I started writing Webkin so that I could download stories from the web and read them on my Kindle when I'm not online. I originally intended to make it output .mobi or .epub files, but it turned out that plain text files look nice enough on the Kindle (at least on my Kindle Voyage), so that's what it outputs for now. I may add other output formats at some point in the future.
Given that online fiction is spread around a LOT of websites, Webkin has a plugin system, hopefully allowing support to be added for any website. I will be adding more plugins myself, but I hope other people will contribute plugins for their favourite websites too.
Webkin plugins are very simple; they're just a single file Ruby module, which extends the main Story class with the following two methods:
self.url_regex
This returns a regex which will match a story page on the website. Webkin
uses this to find the right plugin for a URL which has been passed to it.
fetch
This is the main method in a Webkin plugin; it downloads the story page
(or pages, if your site has multi-page stories) and strips off any header
and footer HTML, leaving just the story section in the html attribute.
It should also populate the title and (if possible) author attributes.
The plugin's filename and Module name must match, with the Module name capitalised.
If you've downloaded Webkin from Github then you should have at least one example plugin to look at.
Webkin is free, but if you'd like to show your appreciation for it then please make a donation towards the running costs of your favourite free fiction site, if they offer ways to do that and you can afford to do so.
(Code Climate)