Modified RSS Feeds

I’m a big RSS user. It’s my preferred method of keeping up to date with news, technology, blogs, and the odd comic.

One thing that’s always bugged me though was the poor implementation of RSS that most sites have. Many sites will just syndicate the headlines of their articles, making you visit the site to read the content. I understand that this is all because of advertising, but it’s still annoying.

Instead of just complaining about this like I normally would, I spent some time and created new feeds that deliver the content from some of these sites the way I like it. For example, penny-arcade.com (a web comic) doesn’t provide the actual comic strips in their feed. Just the title of the comic and a link back to the site.

I modified this feed to grab the actual image and insert it into the feed, and disregard all non-comic posts. I did the same thing for ctrlaltdel-online.com.

The most difficult site was Engrish.com. They don’t even have an RSS feed, so I had to build one by scraping their html page. Now, this wouldn’t have been much of a chore if the html was written properly, but it was tag soup in there.

It took about a day, but I’ve finally got 3 feeds that validate as RSS, and you can subscribe to them in your favourite reader at chriscraig.net/feeds.

If you know of a feed that needs som TLC like these, let me know. I might fix it up if it interests me too.

Enjoy!