This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Phillip Pearson.
Original Post: Feed Normalizer
Feed Title: Second p0st
Feed URL: http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/rss.xml
Feed Description: Tech notes and web hackery from the guy that brought you bzero, Python Community Server, the Blogging Ecosystem and the Internet Topic Exchange
Quite a while back, I hacked up a little tool I call the Feed Normalizer. It's a Python script that reads and parses an RSS or Atom feed (using Mark P's Feed Parser), then spits out a bog-standard RSS 2.0 feed.
Why is this useful? Because it makes it trivial to work around incompatibilies in news aggregators. I use Feed on Feeds, which is great, but it shows me the content of the <description> element rather than of the <content:encoded> one, which sometimes contains more detail. I think BlogX generates feeds like this -- ChrisAn's one does it. The Feed Normalizer lets me see Chris's full posts.
Just recently, Seb Paquet contacted me to ask if I could change the comment monitor so that it would play better with SharpReader, the aggregator he uses. SharpReader has a clever feature where, if it sees an RSS <item> with no <description> element, it displays the linked page (the one in the <link> element) instead. I implemented this; now the comment monitor has a new "RSS without descriptions" link, just for SharpReader users.
... which suggested the possibility of getting the Feed Normalizer to blank out <description> tags for people who only provide summaries of their posts, so Seb could see the posts directly in SharpReader.
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