How I converted RSS to Instagram stories
RSS is quite old technology, but still many people use it. I like RSS, but RSS apps are old fashioned and uncomfortable for me. There are much better designs to read a content than boring news list. The one of them are stories. You may know this from Instagram or Snapchat. So, I decided to create a converter.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
...
<item>
<title>Title</title>
<link>link.html</link>
<description>Description</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<!-- But, where is an image? 😣 -->
</item>
...I wanted to put a title and a short description in each story. Almost all RSS channels deliver this data. But the main problem is with pictures of articles. Some channels delivers pictures, but most don’t. I think, the most important in the stories are images. The picture passes quicker information than the text, and I think this is the heart of stories. So what do with feeds witch don’t provide images?
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
...
<meta property="og:title" content="Title" />
<meta property="og:image" content="image.jpg" />
<!-- Ok, I see an image now! 😍 -->
...We can find the cover image in… HTML social tags of the article. I noticed that, almost every news website has social tags. So I created RSS reader with scraping feature. The result is awesome. I have thousands RSS feeds with nice cover images now.
This is a short story how I created Stories Now. 🚀 Modern RSS Reader. It’s available for Android and iOS for free. You may download it from:
- 💿 Google Play for Android, or
- 📀 App Store for iPhone, or
- App Website.
Check my 🐦 Twitter.
