Kobo Pocket stopped working for specific sites

Question

I've been reading some writings on a few different blogs and news sites through the Pocket integration of the Kobo H2O Aura. How the system works is that you add the web page to your list on Pocket, and then you sync your reader and it automatically downloads the new articles there. Simple stuff.

However, two specific sites have started to give me problems. The firs is the blog I Rolled A Zero, and the second is marxists.org. I've been able to add articles to Pocket just fine, and have them download onto my Kobo just fine, but the downloading suddenly stopped working. For I Rolled A Zero, the downloading stopped working september 25 around 22:00 UTC. I can't download any new blog posts I've added from the blog, they don't show up as even existing on my Pocket account at all. I've tried re-adding older posts that I've already read on my Kobo previously, and those don't show up either.

With marxists.org, I'm not sure how long the problem has been there as when I was checking the Pocket website to see what was going on I noticed that one of the pages that I recently added from there wasn't showing up on my Kobo either. Tried adding a few others, and surprise surprise those didn't show up either. Same goes for stuff I've read on the Kobo before through the same system.

There is no hardware or software change on the Kobo whatsoever. It just was working one moment, and then suddenly not.

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Nothing needs to change on your Kobo for this to stop working. The only thing that needs to happen is that the site where you get your pages from changes from providing whole pages to partial ones that read the rest of the content using JavaScript that the Kobo doesn't (correctly) interpret.

You can check that the above is the case, by going to the pages with JavaScript switched off in your normal browser. The pages most likely will be incomplete.
If this is indeed the case, a remedy is available, but not simple: you have to automatically retrieve the pages with a fully functional browser (with JavaScript turned on), wait until you assume the page is fully rendered (there is no way to be 100% sure about that) and then save the rendered page to a location on a server where you Kobo can read it. Once that is set up, update the URLs on your Kobo to the location where you save it.

I have done such trickery with a Python program and selenium running on my headless server co-located in a data center where I can easily get at the saved material. Other combinations of programming language and browser driving library might work as well.