Reddit.com is an interesting place to read all about trending internet topics ranging from technical subreddits like r/programming to the more whimsical r/funny and everything in between. However, like many websites, Reddit is not particularly mobile friendly. With Kimono’s URL Generator feature, you can now turn your favorite subreddits into a custom mobile app or news feed in just a few clicks!
The steps:
- Create an API for a particular subreddit page
- Add other subreddits you like with the URL Generator feature
- Create a mobile app or RSS news feed with Kimono to display your data
1) Creating your Reddit API:
To start, go to your favorite subreddit or browse subreddits and choose one you like. In this example we will start with r/funny. Now, activate the Kimonify Toolbar by clicking on the kimono bookmarklet or chrome extension.
Create a “title” property and click on the post names to select them:
Now create a “comments” property and select the comments:
Great! Save the API and you are ready to get the rest of your subreddits with Kimono.
2) Using the URL Generator to crawl all your favorite subreddits:
To do this, go to the Crawl Setup tab of your API’s detail page. Here, you can change your crawl strategy to ‘Generated URL List’. This allows you to generate URLs for many pages with the same root domain. You just have to specify the different URL parameters you want to change. Let’s say that your favorite subreddits are r/funny, r/programming, and r/nosleep. For the “funny” URL parameter, taken from the source page for this API, select ‘Custom List’ from the drop down. This is will allow you to specify all the subreddits you want. Enter all your favorite subreddits into this field, each separated by a comma.
Click Save Changes at the bottom of your URL list and your API should be all set! Be sure to also set your Auto-Run Frequency to 15 minutes to ensure your custom Reddit results stay up-to-date. Then hit ‘Start Crawl’ to get all the results from these pages.
3) Creating a mobile app or RSS news feed to display your custom reddit:
Now that you have all the data from your subreddits, you still need to make it mobile ready. There are 2 easy ways to display your results for reading on the go, with an app or with an RSS feed.
- Favorite Subreddits Application:
Kimono has a built-in Mobile App feature that automatically turns Kimono data into a simple mobile app. Go to the Use Data tab of your API details page and click Mobile App to get to this customization page:
Here, you can customize the title and colors of your app. When you are ready, press Create App and you’re done! All of the results should be displayed as a simple, mobile-friendly list.
- Favorite Subreddits News Feed:
Rather than creating an entire app only for your custom reddit, you may want to just include it in a news feed so you have many different sources of news all in one place. To do this, you will need an RSS reader. They allow you to translate RSS data from any site into easy to read posts. A good RSS reader to use is Net Vibes which automatically sources RSS data from many top new websites but also allows you to import your own, such as this one for your favorite reddit.
To do this, go to the RSS endpoint on your API detail page located just below the name of your API at Endpoints:
Now, add the URL for this RSS endpoint to your RSS reader of choice to create a news feed for your favorite subreddits. With Net Vibes, for example, you would press Add + in the top left corner and paste your RSS endpoint URL there. After saving, you should see all of the results as an easy-to-view news feed for mobile devices:
Now, you have 2 simple ways to stay on top of Reddit whenever you are!
Want to get more results? Check out Kimono’s pagination feature to go beyond the first page of each subreddit and get every bit of that Reddit-y goodness.
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