Syncing Netnewswire starred items to Anybox
I’ve been migrating my online feedreading to Netnewswire on my mac. Being in control of how stuff works becomes more and more a trend (and a must in some occasions). A thighly knit web isn’t really transfered that easily so I had a small thing that I wanted to solve and that is starring items for reading them later. In my case, my read it later list is stored in Anybox.
I know of other extensible rss readers like miniflux, but didn’t want the maintanence, thus I settled on Netnewswire. Netnewswire stores it database in a SQLite database and Anybox has a applescript interface. With the help of Cursor it took me a bit over 30 minutes to get everything together. The script uses the python dbm module as a small db to keep track of what is synced so it doesn’t add any that’s already been added.
The script runs every 5 minutes with the launchd deamon, configured trough Launch Control. Here it is:
import sqlite3
import subprocess
import dbm
DB_PATH = "/Users/<your_username>/Library/Containers/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire-Evergreen/Data/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Accounts/<some_more_user_folder>/DB.sqlite3"
DMB_PATH = "/<absolute_path_to_the_folder_where_you_put_the_script>/cache"
def get_starred_articles(db_path):
conn = sqlite3.connect(db_path)
cursor = conn.cursor()
query = """
SELECT articles.articleID, COALESCE(articles.url, articles.externalUrl), articles.datePublished as article_url
FROM articles
JOIN statuses ON articles.articleID = statuses.articleID
WHERE statuses.starred = 1
LIMIT 100
"""
cursor.execute(query)
starred_articles = cursor.fetchall()
conn.close()
return starred_articles
def load_urls():
with dbm.open(DMB_PATH, 'c') as db:
return db['urls'].decode('utf-8').split("|")
def save_urls(urls):
with dbm.open(DMB_PATH, 'c') as db:
db['urls'] = "|".join(urls).encode('utf-8')
def main():
starred_articles = get_starred_articles(DB_PATH)
synced_urls = load_urls()
for article in starred_articles:
id = article[0]
url = article[1]
date = article[2]
if url in synced_urls:
print(f'{url} already synced, skipping')
continue
anybox_script = f'''
tell application id "cc.anybox.Anybox"
set input to "{url}"
save input
end tell
'''
synced_urls.append(url)
subprocess.run(['osascript', '-e', anybox_script])
save_urls(synced_urls)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
Here is how that looks in Launch Control:
I’m looking forward to integrating more things just like I had previously, but having access to local sqlite databases is quite nice ✌️.