I have been an avid fan of Google Reader. But it is really frustrating to get a RSS feed which is partial. Now if I have subscribed to a newspaper than it’s a huge pain to open each page from RSS title or “Continue Reading” to read it.
I tried a few Chrome plugins. But again not satisfied as I do not have full content with me to further process it.
So what are my options now. Did some Google search and found a seemingly difficult solution – Yahoo Pipes.
Lets pick a newspaper for the demo. – The Hindu.
How its RSS looks now ?
So lets begin - I created my first pipe which parse the The Hindu RSS Feed.
What this pipe does ?
This pipe fetches the specified RSS feed, reads the web pages indicated in the links of the RSS feed items, extracts the contents from the web pages between the specified tags, and write back the extracted contents into the description of the RSS feed items.
How it works?
1. The URL is fetched by the RSS URL operator. The we loop this RSS Feed through Loop operator.
2. Then we need to supply the begin and end tags.
How to find these tags ?
Go to the news page and open the source code view. There you need to identify the tag from where the news item is started and ended.
Why this tag ?
Well, when I was designing my Full RSS feed, I wanted it to be more like Instapaper like look and feel, i.e. free from all advertisements, and other clutters.
3. And the last option is to pass the content through REGEX. It filters out the content which contains and special characters or any other thing which you specify.
4. Then get the result in pipe out.
How RSS will look like now ?
Tips : You may create such RSS for each sub category.
Disclaimer : This post is only for educational purpose. Content used in the post is only for demo.
