simplepie

Yesterday Development Seed was kind enough to give Chris & me a rundown of how the Drupal community is organizing its participation in the Google Summer of Code program. Along the way I got a chance to chat with Alex and Ian about FeedAPI and FeedAPI Mapper, two excellent projects that DevSeed ushered into being through last year's Summer of Code and now continues to maintain and extend.

I've just begun using FeedAPI for the first time in a project destined for production, and so far I'm very pleased with it. It offers a more fully-considered alternative to aggregator.module — and with the addition of the optional Mapper module it becomes simple to turn aggregated RSS items into Drupal nodes, with the items' attributes stuck in whatever CCK fields you care to create. It's really slick.

In my case I'm using it as an integration point for Blip.tv. Our client needs video capabilities, but I saw no reason why we should mess around with transcoding, customizing an FLV player and all the rest of the headaches that come with web video (been there, done that). Blip does all of that stuff very well, and has social features baked in, too. I'd rather just have the client upload their videos there, then count on FeedAPI to turn them into nodes that can be exposed through Views. Any configuration that we can't get from the Blip RSS feed can be manually handled by an editor — Workflow-NG fires off a "please come edit and publish me!" email whenever a new video node is created.

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.