Full-text RSS bookmarklet

May 12, 2008 at 9:59 am

This site offers a nifty utility for dealing with those annoying sites which offer only partial text content in their RSS and Atom feeds.

Given an RSS or Atom feed’s URL, the CGI will iterate through the posts in the feed, scrape the full text of each post from its HTML page, and re-generate a new RSS feed containing the full text.

The one thing it’s missing is a one-click bookmarklet version. So here it is:

Full-text RSS Bookmarklet

Drag that to your bookmarks menu, and next time you’re looking at a partial-text feed, click the bookmark to transform the viewed page into the full-text version. Enjoy!

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Link-blog Networking

May 12, 2006 at 2:38 pm

Cool — del.icio.us just added a feature whereby you can now see who has you in their network, and, of course, you can further view their networks and see who’s in them.

This’d be great to produce social-network graphs, although I daresay Joshua mightn’t be so keen on the spidering load. ;) I’ve optimistically requested some form of dump, anyway.

The social networking aspect of link collection and link-blogging via del.icio.us is emerging nicely; I’m keen to see what’s next in the pipeline.

A few interesting things:

  • Almost everyone who’s using del.icio.us seriously for link collection — ie. applying some quality control thresholds, and bothering to write one-line descriptions, at least — has filled out their ‘network’ by now.

  • It’d be useful to have “groups”, so that we can now assert things like “jm, boogah, n0wak, negatendo, tweebiscuit, leonardr, muckster and torrez form a group”. I’m sure that’d provide useful info, although could probably be inferred anyway. (People are attempting to hack it by using a shared tag on all their postings, like the “irishblogs” tag, but that’s an awful misuse of tagging in my opinion ;)

  • Also, it’ll be interesting to see what’ll happen once Google Co-op figures out a way to incorporate the del.icio.us network data. To be honest, I’m very surprised it wasn’t already in there — it seems like a no-brainer… maybe some Y!/G corporate rivalry is getting in the way.

Anyway, in the meantime it’s producing lots of good fodder for my SpicyLinks feed.

SpicyLinks is an implementation of something that I mentioned in a comment on this weblog entry, regarding future methods of reading weblogs; in essence, it’s an automated blog aggregation summariser. It reads other people’s link-blogs, so I don’t have to, and reports the stuff that proves popular in my personal collection of sources.
(Credit where due: HotLinks provided much of the inspiration, but doesn’t support personalisation, hence the reimplementation.)

SpicyLinks is similar to Populicious, but that app really misses the point, in my opinion. I don’t particularly want to know what everyone is pointing at; I want to know what a selected set of trusted sources (with good taste!) are pointing at.

This aggregation is pretty similar to the del.icio.us ‘network’ feed, but with much lower volume, and a higher signal/noise ratio, attained by dropping the ‘one-off’ items that only one person is pointing at. Initially, that may seem like a major failure, since you miss the ‘fresh bits’ — but as long as you’ve got the right people in your source network, it actually works very well.

It’d be great if this was one of the features implemented in the del.icio.us ‘network’ system…

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RSS Feeds for Events in Dublin

April 6, 2006 at 9:05 pm

So, now that I’m back in Dublin, I’ve taken a quick look around for ways to keep up to date on upcoming live gigs — and found that the situation, frankly, sucks. In particular, almost none of the sites are offering RSS or Atom feeds yet.

Having said that, Waxy and Leonard’s Upcoming.org is doing quite nicely for the Dublin metro area:

And lots of credit for the promoter, MCD, who seem to be just about the only Irish listings site who offer RSS:

This is fantastic, but — naturally — they don’t cover events put on by their competitors. ;)

Apart from that, it’s pretty shoddy. Lots of late-90’s-looking websites out there, and no feeds in sight. Thankfully, Feed43, and some perl scripting, is on hand to allow me to take matters into my own hands.

Entertainment Ireland offer a pretty good music news section — but sans feed. Feed43 saves the day:

And, surprisingly, Ticketmaster, of all sites, is turning out to be a great way to find out what’s on in Dublin, listing pretty much all ticketed events in a nice, clean, succinct format. Unfortunately, the highest location resolution it offers for Ireland is the country as a whole. However, this can be worked around by subscribing to individual venues, such as Crawdaddy or The Village. (This has a happy side-effect of narrowing down the types of music — I can skip finding out that The Eagles are playing, since they won’t be playing at Crawdaddy ;)

For some reason, though, Ticketmaster haven’t got around to offering their own RSS feeds. Not a problem — in response I’ve hacked up tm2rss.cgi, a little script which scrapes the venue pages and produces RSS:

For other venues, simply take the venue URL (for example, http://www.ticketmaster.ie/venue/198641 for The Village), add the numeric venue ID in place of NNNNN in this URL: http://taint.org/scraped/tm2rss.cgi?v=NNNNN , then use that as the Feed URL in your feed reader.

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