Free online convertion of pages into RSS feed

Again I am a big fan of Flipboard the best free application to read news on iOS and Android. I am also a big fan of SkimFeed which I also like to read for my daily news. Unfortunately the two of them do not work well because SkimFeed does not provide any RSS feed.

Fortunately there is a great free service named Feed43 which does exactly what we need, but it is not really immediately straightforward how to use it.

  1. Create a new feed here, and put the url you want into the address box, you can leave the encoding box empty, and click Reload. I used http://skimfeed.com/latest.php?c=1
  2. In global search pattern just put {%}
  3. In item search pattern, identify the link, name and information you want to publish in your RSS feed and identify them with {%}. I used <a href=’http://skimfeed.com/{%}'{*}title='{%}'{*}</a> – {%}<br> where the first {%} identified the url suffix, the second {%} identified the title, and the third {%} identified where the link comes from. Click Extract to test your rules.
  4. Fill the title, link and description. Note that the link will be used as a prefix for your links. So in my case I use http://skimfeed.com/ which I skipped during the search
  5. Enter {%1}, {%2}, etc. into the item title template, item link template, and item content template boxes. Where {%1} was the first {%} from the search pattern, and as follow. So in my case I used {%2} in item title template, {%1} in item link template, and {%3} in item content template.
  6. Click Preview. If everything worked as expected you should have a nice preview of the resulting RSS feed and a link to use (http://feed43.com/1746038366683264.xml in my case).
  7. Enter manually that full URL into Flipboard and you are done!

I also made another one for Freshnews.org: http://feed43.com/3421254840553503.xml

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