EchoDitto Labs - Full-Text RSS - Comments

Hey NX, sorry about that --

Tom — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:17:44 -0700

Hey NX, sorry about that -- we moved some things around today and it affected the tool. Everything should be fixed now, though -- please let me know if you continue to have problems with it.

Awesome tool - I've been

NX — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:02:00 -0700

Awesome tool - I've been using it for the last few days.

BUT.... not sure if it's just me, but it's not working anymore.

I get the following error message:

"XML document must have a top level element. Error processing resource 'http://labs.echoditto.com/projects/fulltextrss/?url=..."

It would be great if you could get it up and running again.

I know this because I've

inchirieri masini — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 04:40:54 -0700

I know this because I've known quite a number of people who have done this sort of thing and it was theft. He didn't give them a working credit card so odds are he wanted something for free or little cost.

Tom - I'm working on an

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:51:45 -0700

Tom -

I'm working on an application that allows me to compile large amounts of text from RSS feeds and save it all to a .txt file. I'm writing applescript to help me do this. Could I look at your source code to see if I could implement something similar?

Thanks,

Andrew

flack dot andrew at gmail dot com

Cyndy: you're welcome to

Tom — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:57:07 -0700

Cyndy: you're welcome to email me about the problem at the address mentioned above. But you should note that this service is known to not work with every blog or character set, and isn't supported in any official way. So the odds that your difficulty is going to be resolved are fairly low, I'm afraid.

Found a weird bug. Please

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:10:44 -0700

Found a weird bug. Please email me and I can show you the issue. Don't want to post it out in the open due to the blog I wanted to use it on. ;)

Hello Tom, This is great

nguoiquangngai — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:48:06 -0700

Hello Tom,

This is great script that I can see. I love your codes. I would appreciated if could get a copy of this via my email.

Thank you very much for great share

I apologize for the

Tom — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:27:26 -0700

I apologize for the limitation, Oleh. Unfortunately PHP (and in particular PHP4) is quite bad at handling extended character sets, and I have no plans to resolve the situation.

If anyone would like to volunteer to work on improving unicode support (or porting the algorithm to a more unicode-friendly language), I'd of course be happy to share the source.

Thanks for this great

Oleh — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:34:32 -0700

Thanks for this great service. I only have a problem with French - it is not displayed correctly - is it possible to fix?

Also Cyrillic is problematic - no visibility at all.

superb .... just thing i was

@nks — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:46:35 -0700

superb .... just thing i was looking for ... since long ...

Hi folks. A few things: -

Tom — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:38:35 -0700

Hi folks. A few things:

- the script is not for sale or able to be used toward for-profit ends, regardless of whether I have distributed it to you or not

- if you'd like a copy of the script I need you to email me: tom (at) echoditto (dot) com. I can't keep track of the requests via comments -- please email.

Submitted by Video seyret

video seyret — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:20:14 -0700

Submitted by Video seyret (not verified) on Thu, 04/24/2008 - 16:16.
i am running my video blog :D Good mann.

--------

Yes mee to running..

Thank you. This is super

seyret — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:18:56 -0700

Thank you. This is super system. Its working..

Hi Tom! Could you send me

Geert — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:13:02 -0700

Hi Tom!

Could you send me this script please?
I shall use this script only for my own purposes.
Please contact me at gjerutten (dot) hotmail (dot) com

Thanks

Hi Tom! My name is Ivan. I'm

Ivan — Mon, 26 May 2008 01:08:45 -0700

Hi Tom!
My name is Ivan. I'm from Russia.
May I buy this script? How much is it?
I shall use this script only for my own purposes.
Please contact me at vanno@list.ru
Thanks!

Full-Text RSS

Tom — Tue, 01 May 2007 11:37:28 -0700

Partial-text RSS feeds are a pet peeve of mine. I'm not alone: I've read about Dave Winer and Steve Rubel's dislike of the practice. I'm sure there are a lot of other RSS users who are similarly irked by it.

So, after having a post-workout algorithmic epiphany (it's the best time for them), I started work on a little project to fix this annoyance — and ended up quite pleased with the result. You might find it useful, too: it's a little script that creates full-text RSS feeds from partial feeds. Just enter the URL of a partial feed in the box below and hit submit. You'll be directed to a URL that will (hopefully) provide a full-text version of the feed you specified.

I've been through a few different versions of the algorithm, but this one seems to be fairly universal and stable. It won't work for every partial-text feed, but it seems to work for a lot of them. I'm sure it could be better, which tempts me to open source the algorithm and invite people to improve upon it. But I won't — not yet, anyway.

I'm sensitive to the pressures that make bloggers use partial text feeds — some of my friends depend on selling advertising to support their sites. Unfortunately, RSS simply isn't respected by marketers and their clients. Offering a full text feed means fewer page views, which means less revenue — I've been told this bluntly by a friend who wanted to offer full text, did so, then noticed his revenues were shrinking. It's hard to fault him for returning to partial-text feeds.

But this situation isn't a problem with RSS; it's a problem with the ad industry. It's long past time for people to realize that if they give content away on the web they'll be unable to control how others choose to consume it. Inconveniencing users is not an acceptable solution to advertisers' inability to adopt new metrics.

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. This feature does need to pass out of my hands — its proper place is in the RSS reader, both for performance reasons and in order to eliminate one class of countermeasures that bloggers could take. Maybe I'll try my hand at adapting the code for Vienna.

A few technical notes: depending on the site, some entries may come back with comments or other cruft attached. Fellow geeks can trim those off by specifying URL-encoded regexes, passed in the querystring as parameters regex0 – regex9 (note that an outstanding issue with PHP magic quotes means that the + character doesn't work; use {1,} instead). I'd encourage users who create regexes for feeds to share them by tagging the URL with "fulltextrss" on del.icio.us. There are already a few examples available here.

Finally, please note that the service employs PEAR's function caching on a 15 minute timeout. If the results you're getting aren't up-to-date, just be patient (or alter one of the regex parameters).