Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Custom RSS Feeds

So, lets break down the problem. I use RSS feeds a lot to read the news. For the uninitiated, RSS feeds (which stands for Really Simple Syndication), are a nice way to aggregate multiple sources and see changes from said sources in a convenient manner. Basically, I can see the headlines from many locations in one place and read the articles I want. Sounds good, right?

It would be, but most sites have only a single sentence description for the “article” which means you have to load the full site to realize that, more often than not, the article isn’t something you wanted to read, or so horribly written you wish you hadn’t read it. To make matters worse, some even go as far as to insert ads into the RSS feeds. Often the ad is bigger than the article description itself. Guess that means their articles aren’t good enough to bring traffic to their site so they feel they have to make money by inserting ads into their RSS feeds. This is akin to watching a commercial trying to get you to watch a new television show and inserting an ad in the middle of the commercial.