this is a quick-and-dirty server to render arbitrary web articles to DOCX, and return them to the
user. by going to http://<site>:8080/article?url=<url>
and providing a URL, the server will:
- fetch the URL
- parse the contents with mercury-parser
- convert to DOCX using pandoc
- send this file in the response
this exists for one specific purpose: sending web articles to my kindle. (hence the DOCX instead of EPUB; the kindle can't read EPUB files, and pandoc can't output MOBI.) by hosting this on a personal server, i can hook into it with iOS Shortcuts and email things to my kindle from my phone. (figuring it out on desktop is left as an exercise to the reader; personally i'm okay with manually emailing it afterward.)
it's also my first node project, so it was kinda fun to get my footing with a new environment.