Dev.to WebDev 🛠 Dev 👁 1 📖 2 min read

I Built an RSS Aggregator That Extracts Full Article Content (Not Just Summaries)

Most RSS feed readers give you a 200-character summary and force you to click through to read the full article. That's useless if you're building news monitoring pipelines, AI training datasets, or content curation tools

Most RSS feed readers give you a 200-character summary and force you to click through to read the full article. That's useless if you're building news monitoring pipelines, AI training datasets, or content curation tools.

So I built a proper RSS Feed Aggregator that follows each article link and extracts the complete full-text content — clean, structured, and ready to use.

What It Does

  • Multi-feed ingestion — Point it at multiple RSS/Atom feeds simultaneously
  • Full-text extraction — Uses trafilatura to extract the actual article content, stripping boilerplate, ads, and navigation
  • Deduplication — Automatically detects and removes duplicate articles across feeds
  • Rich metadata — Word counts, authorship, publish dates, images, source tracking
  • Keyword filtering — Include/exclude articles by keywords

Example Output

Each article comes back as structured JSON:

{
  "title": "The only AI glossary you'll need this year",
  "fullContent": "...3,727 words of clean extracted text...",
  "author": "Kyle Wiggers",
  "publishedDate": "2026-07-04T10:00:00Z",
  "wordCount": 3727,
  "imageUrl": "https://...",
  "sourceFeed": "https://techcrunch.com/feed/",
  "sourceUrl": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/04/..."
}

Real-World Use Cases

  1. AI/LLM Training Data — Need clean text without HTML boilerplate? This outputs publication-ready content.
  2. News Monitoring — Aggregate dozens of feeds and get full articles, not snippets.
  3. Content Curation — Pull from multiple sources, deduplicate, filter by keywords.
  4. Research Pipelines — Collect articles on specific topics for analysis.

Try It

The tool is live on the Apify Store: RSS Feed Aggregator & Article Extractor

It uses pay-per-event pricing at $0.01 per article extracted. If you're on Apify's free tier ($5/mo credits), that covers ~500 articles — enough for a solid test run.

Input Parameters

Parameter Default Description
feedUrls required RSS/Atom feed URLs
maxResults 50 Maximum articles to extract
extractContent true Follow links and extract full text
deduplicate true Remove duplicate articles
keywordFilter [] Include/exclude keywords

How Full-Text Extraction Works

The actor uses trafilatura, a Python library specifically designed for web text extraction. Unlike basic regex or BeautifulSoup approaches, trafilatura:

  • Strips navigation, sidebars, footers, and ads
  • Preserves article structure (paragraphs, headings)
  • Handles JavaScript-rendered content
  • Works across 20+ languages

This means you get the actual article text — not the RSS description, not a truncated summary, but the full content as the author wrote it.

If you're working with RSS feeds or news data, give it a try. Happy to add features based on feedback — what would make this useful for your use case?

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