Using FreshRSS's HTML + XPath with GoComics

FreshRSS supports scraping a site using XPath to generate new items for a feed. GoComics does not provide an RSS feed for comics to use but it is possible to use XPath on a comic’s page to get each day’s comic.

Set the feed URL to the comic’s page (e.g. https://www.gocomics.com/fminus for F Minus).

Under “Type of feed source”, set these options:

• Type of feed source: HTML + XPath (Web scraping)
• finding news items:

  //div[contains(@class, "gc-deck--cta-0")]//picture[contains(@class, "gc-card__image")]
  

• item title:

  parent::h4
  

• item content:

  ./img
  

• item link (URL):

  ancestor::a/@href
  

• item thumbnail:

  descendant::img/@src
  

• item author:

  "F Minus"
  

• Custom date/time format:

  Y.m.d
  

This is enough to regularly check the GoComics page and fetch each day’s comic. The title won’t reflect the date and instead be urn:sha1:<sha1 hash>. I haven’t figured out why that is but I also don’t care enough to fix it.