We've just rolled out several exciting updates to Feed Control to improve your experience and give you more control over your feeds.
New Interface
image
We've redesigned Feed Control with a responsive interface that also allows us to implement new features more easily than before. This might still be rough around the edges, so please let us know if you experience any issues. For now you can still switch to the old UI, but we'll be phasing that out soon.
Feed Export Options
image
It's now possible to export the feeds you've added to your account in either CSV format or OPML. An OPML export will use the generated feed URLs (if you've enabled feed generation) or the source feed URLs if you haven't.
Note: this will only export the feed data, not the feed items.
Re-Fetch Content for Feed Items
For feeds that have been set up with full-text expansion, it's now possible to manually trigger article extraction on existing feed items.
image
This can be useful in a number of different cases, for example:
  • When you know a feed item's content has been updated and you need the changes reflected in Feed Control.
  • After you've set up or modified custom extraction rules to better extract the content you're interested in (see new feature below)
Custom Extraction Rules
Plus and Business plans only. This is an advanced feature. Customers on our business plan can contact us if they need us to set this up for their feeds.
You now have the ability to provide custom rules for feeds with full-text fetching enabled.
This advanced feature gives you greater control over how Feed Control extracts articles from specific websites.
To use this feature:
  1. Navigate to your feed settings
  2. Enable "Fetch full-text content"
  3. Enter custom site configuration in the "Site Config" field
This is particularly useful for:
  • Accessing paywalled content - Include authentication cookies to be sent in the HTTP header for sites you're subscribed to
  • Fixing article extraction - Specify exactly how content should be extracted from specific sites
body: [XPath]
Use this to specify which element contains the main article content. Multiple statements accepted. Will evaluate in order until a result is found. If not specified or no match found, it will be auto-detected.
body: //div[@id='body']
# also possible to specify multiple
# elements to be concatenated:
body: //div[@class='summary'] | //div[@id='body']
strip: [XPath]
Strip any matching elements and their children. Multiple statements accepted.
strip: //div[@class='hidden']
strip: //div[@id='content']//p[@class='promo']
strip_id_or_class: [string]
Strip any element whose @id or @class contains this substring. Multiple statements accepted.
strip_id_or_class: hidden
strip_id_or_class: navigation
strip_image_src: [string]
Strip any <img> element where @src attribute contains this substring. Multiple statements accepted.
strip_image_src: /advert/
strip_image_src: /tracker/
http_header([header name]): [header value]
Send additional HTTP headers for requests to this site. Only the following headers are accept:
  • user-agent
  • cookie
  • referer
  • accept-language
# Appear to be an iPhone
http_header(user-agent): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_4_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/135.0.7049.83 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
#
# Skip cookie wall for a particular GDPR system
http_header(cookie): euConsent=true