fulltextrss

A number of people have emailed me asking for the Full-text RSS project code. I appreciate the interest! And I'm happy to oblige so long as they send me an assurance that they won't be using it for commercial purposes — e.g. processing and selling ads on someone else's feed.

A number of people have sent me those assurances, but I've been slow to send out tarballs. I apologize! If you're waiting on one and haven't heard from me by the end of the day, please email me again: tom (at) echoditto (dot) com.

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.