Setting up the feeds

Each feed represents a section of the created newspaper. When you add a feed, give the section a title, specify which days it should be retrieved on, and the URL of the RSS feed.

Excluding categories

Some feeds contain category information about each article. You can list categories you want to exclude, and this will remove all articles from these categories in all sections

Of the 5 sites which SmallNews has special handlers for, The Guardian, New York Times and BBC News have categories. The Times and Washington Post do not.

Generating the newspaper

When you create the newspaper, it will write an HTML file to the output folder you specify. This will have today’s date, so previous days’ editions will not be overwritten (but it will overwrite other editions you have generated earlier today).

All articles from the last 24 hours are included, so if you run it at the same time every day, you will get every article. I typically run it around 7am every morning.

The generated HTML uses a three column layout which is not supported by all browsers. Firefox can both display and print this correctly. Safari 4 can display it correctly but will print in a single column.