Offline Archive of RSS Feed Content

DEVONthink Tips
1

I’ve asked this question in the past, but I never really received an answer that explained things properly (IMO), and I was hoping someone could help clear this up for me once and for all…

The answer I was given before sorta suggested that I wait until the next beta release of Devonthink Pro Office because it would have an RSS pane that would help me accomplish what I was aiming to do…Now that the RSS pane is here, I am still a bit at a loss on something…

I need a way to keep an offline archive of the entries in a particular RSS feed. Currently, all items in my RSS feed are added to my DT database as an HTML file which references some web page out on the net (as evidenced by the fact that upon clicking any item in my list, DT is clearly going online to retrieve the content of that RSS item.

What I am seeking to do is to make a local copy of the content of each item in my RSS feed for the following reasons:

  • So that if I find myself on an airplane or somewhere where I happen to be unable to connect to the internet, that I can still have full offline access to all content from all items of my RSS feed without requiring that DT go online to retrieve the content of each item
  • So that in case the site on the net disappears one day, then I will still have the content of that RSS item stored on my machine.

Something along the lines of a script that could somehow batch convert all existing HTML files within my feed and convert them to a .webarchive file would be great…
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated… Thanks!

2

Move the articles to a group, then use this script:


-- Convert URLs to web documents
-- Created by Christian Grunenberg on Wed Mar 15 2006.
-- Copyright (c) 2006-2009. All rights reserved.

tell application id "com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2"
	set theSelection to the selection
	if theSelection is not {} then
		try
			show progress indicator "Converting..." steps (count of theSelection)
			repeat with theRecord in theSelection
				set theName to name of theRecord
				set theURL to URL of theRecord
				step progress indicator theName
				if theURL begins with "http:" or theURL begins with "https:" then
					set theGroup to parent 1 of theRecord
					create web document from theURL name theName in theGroup
				end if
			end repeat
			hide progress indicator
		on error error_message number error_number
			hide progress indicator
			if the error_number is not -128 then display alert "DEVONthink Pro" message error_message as warning
		end try
	end if
end tell