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full text feeds (Instapundit and Powerline)

Thursday,  06/26/08  10:58 PM

I love RSS, and I love full text feeds.  (There, I said it!)

But... unfortunately as a user I have no control over whether a given site gives me a full text feed.  I can email the blogger, but that rarely helps.  Several of my favorite feeds are not full text, they contain only bitty crappy teasers, designed to get me to visit their sites to read more; including Instapundit and Power Line.  So anyway it is what it is...

No, wait!  Stop the presses!  It isn't what it is, because I am a programmer.  I do have some control over this, I can make my own feed!  (A little while ago I got frustrated that Cycling News, one of my favorite sites, didn't even have a feed; so I made one; that gave me the idea.)  All there is to a feed is an XML-formatted description of the site's home page.  I can retrieve the home page and reformat it into a valid RSS format, and poof, full-text feed!  Man triumphant against the elements...

This gave me great satisfaction.  And so, for your feed-reading pleasure, you too may use my full text feeds for Instapundit and Power Line.  Enjoy!

P.S. Armed with this knowledge, I plan to create full text feeds for more blogs, so stay tuned :)

[ Update: There's another variation of this, blogs which do have full text feeds but where the feeds don't contain HTML, just text.  Napsterization would be an example.  I'm sure most of these bloggers aren't engineers and have no idea how to fix their feeds, but they sure are annoying.  But I can create full text feeds for them, too.  Yay.  Stay tuned... ]

[ Another update: I changed the URLs for the feeds to be on w-uh.com instead of eichhorns.com... ]