So, you saw Sans Bullshit Sans (which I previously blogged about) and thought that Sans Bullshit Sans font is cool, but its word list doesn't really match up with my field's bullshit?

As mentioned in that previous post, Sans Bullshit Sans is open-source and comes with a detailed blog post explaining how it was made. Which means we can follow those instructions to modify the word list.

Liferea is a desktop news aggregator (sometimes called an RSS reader). Unlike the late Google Reader or most of its alternatives like the open-source Tiny Tiny RSS which are web-based and run on a server to be accessed via a web browser, Liferea is a separate desktop application and uses an embedded browser to view content.

The problem#

Sometimes you don't actually care about all of the items in a feed and the site provides no filtering mechanism. If the uninteresting items are rare enough, you can just ignore them, but a news aggregator is most useful if it only notifies you of news items you actually might want to read.

The solution#

Luckily, Liferea is very flexible. It supports running a command on a feed which it calls a conversion filter. I wrote some python scripts to filter feeds by title locally.

For instance, I wanted to follow only the changelog posts in the forum feed http://braceyourselfgames.com/forums/feed.php, but it includes changes to all forum topics, so I checked the Use conversion filter option and set the conversion filter to

/path/to/atom_filter_title.py --whitelist "Re: Change log"