Open source ‘full text’ bookmarklet and feed filter
Last year, I blogged about Full-Text RSS, a utility to convert those useless “partial-text” RSS/Atom feeds into the real, full-story-inline deal.
The only downside is that the author felt it necessary to withhold the source, saying:
Still, I wouldn’t want to offer a feature that middlemen can resell at the expense of bloggers. So while I do want to open this up, I don’t want to make things easy for the unscrupulous.
However, recently Keyvan Minoukadeh from the Five Filters project got in touch to say:
I recently created a similar service (along with a bookmarklet for it). [...] It’s a free software (open source) project so code is also available.
Here it is:
fivefilters.org: Create Full-Text Feeds
I’ve tried it out and it works great, and the source is indeed downloadable under the AGPL.
Five Filters — its overarching project — looks interesting, too:
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky describe the media as businesses which sell a product (readers) to other businesses (advertisers). In their propaganda model of the media they point to five ‘filters’ which determine what we read in the newspapers and see on the television. These filters produce a very narrow view of the world that is in line with government policy and business interests.
In this project we try to encourage readers to explore the world of non-corporate online news, websites which avoid the five filters of the propaganda model. We also try to make these sources of news more accessible by allowing users to print the stories found on these alternative news sites in the format of a newspaper.
Tags: atom, conversion, feeds, filtering, filters, full-text, partial-text, rss, text
Keyvan said,
July 6, 2009 @ 10:46 pm
Cheers Justin! Appreciate the mention and I’m glad you found the project’s goal interesting. :)
James said,
July 6, 2009 @ 11:57 pm
ugh, Affero GPL is hardly a step up from not distributing the source code, it’s even more viral than the GPL. Luckily the ideas aren’t bound by that license, so a reimplementation in a language better than PHP with a more friendly license should be quite doable.
Keyvan said,
July 7, 2009 @ 12:03 am
James, I don’t think ideas themselves are ever bound by a license – correct me if I’m wrong. As for the libraries, they’re certainly more permissive and I’m sure non-PHP alternatives exist. So yes, reimplementation wouldn’t be difficult. :)