backtone/README.md

Backtone

Backtone is a program that converts websites to Atom RSS feeds and prints the results to stdout. It should be called via a server-side script that then writes the resulting XML to the webpage.

The name is a playful nod toward converting contents back to the web of yesteryear. Why suffer in Web 2/3 when you could go "back to one"?

Dependencies

Scraping (not needed for API mode)

To ensure Backtone always supports current ECMAScript standards, it needs a headless browser instance to execute client-side scripts. To avoid Cloudflare/similar challenge interference, we use FlareSolverr. Its Docker image also contains the browser we use.

Usage

All files needed for usage, including an the input XML, server-side script, and reverse proxy config, have examples in the examples folder in this repo.

1. Create a server-side script that calls backtone with the only argument being a base64-encoded XML in the format specified when running backbone with no arguments
2. Serve that script via a reverse proxy
   • Now when a feed reader fetches the feed, the feed will be created in real time