The need for feeds: Full-text rss

Jan2010

RSS feeds are a great way to subscribe to your favourite websites. The technology brings information directly to your computer or mobile device. This effectively saves you from having to visit each site individually on a regular basis to check for new items.

For those of us who currently consume news and information online through RSS feeds, it can be frustrating when some feeds only provide quick access to headlines and the first sentence of the article. This is especially bothersome when reading feeds while riding the subway or being anywhere without an Internet connection. It would be more useful to have access to the entire article without having to leave the RSS feed reader.

To help remedy the situation and to ring in the New Year, I’ve put up a web-based tool that generates full-text RSS feeds. The app is largely based on Keyvan’s open-source project at Five Filters, and is my attempt to help expand the reach and scope of his useful application.

The tool essentially loads up the feed items, parses out the main content of each item, and then creates a new feed. The version that I’ve put online will pull the 10 latest items and will refresh the feed every 20 minutes. However, I’m open to other configurations if people have different preferences. I’ve also been working on a feature to merge and filter items, so that readers can customize their feeds a little more.

If you’d like to bypass the web-based interface and prefer not to use the bookmarklet tool, you can generate a full-text feed via URL.

http://www.a9z.org/makefulltextfeed.php?url=[URL]

Simply replace [URL] with the address of your RSS feed. For example:

http://www.a9z.org/makefulltextfeed.php?url=http://rss.cbc.ca/lineup/sports.xml

Once you figure out what feeds you want, try out Google Reader in conjunction with Feedly. It’ll be like having your own personalized online magazine.

[Check out The Need for Feeds: Full-Text RSS Feed Creator]