I previously posted about my large library of archived Revit blog posts. I then got a request from Mr Stewart to shed some light on how I automate the RSS to PDF process. It is a lengthy process, and I’m sure there are easier and better ways, but here is how I did it:
- Set up a dedicated Google alias, for Reader and Gmail
- Make a big RSS list in a specific folder in Reader. Mine is shared here. Share that feed folder from Reader.
- I then burnt this shared feed in Feedburner:
- Then, I subscribed to my own burnt feed via email (Gmail address from step 1), by using the Feedburner page here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/revitFeedsRssInGoogleReader - I then installed and set up a portable Thunderbird profile, using my Gmail alias from step 1
- So now, Thunderbird was receiving daily email summaries of all Revit related blogs – I just had to get this info into a PDF somehow. I used PDFCreator, due to its autonaming functionality.
- Install PDFCreator
- In Thunderbird options (Tools – Options – Config Editor), set PDFCreator as the default printer using print.print_printer. Here are my printer settings in Thunderbird:
- Go into PDFCreator to set the Auto-save options:
- Now, back to Thunderbird. Set up a filter like this
- To auto-create the PDFs, just – Open Thunderbird, Get Mail, Tools – Run Filters on folder. Once it is set up, it is very easy to use.
Here is an example of the kind of PDF output I get – link here. The formatting is perhaps suboptimal, but most images are retained and the text can be indexed by a search program like Google Desktop.
Graham’s message:
Graham H Stewart BIM Associate at Ramboll UK
To: Luke Johnson
Date: July 11, 2012
Hi luke
Seen you blog regarding automation of rss feed via PDF
. Can you shed some light on this as I would like to know more
Cheers
G
#livefromitaly
Sent from LinkedIn for iPad
Another request I received was about how I sort and organise all the info I collect. I will add some info on this later:
