I’d love to see a new “Fetch Link Article via Readability” option that I can set on a per-feed basis. I want this for feeds like http://news.ycombinator.com/rss and https://lobste.rs/rss which don’t include any of the source item, just the URL to an article.
If I turned this option on for the Hacker News feed then NewsBlur would fetch the story from the URL, run it through readability, and append it to the content of the item in the RSS/Atom feed separated by an or something so that if the feed *did* include some content itself you would see it first, then the 's content below it.
This would really make certain feeds a lot nicer to read. Right now you have to always click the link in the feed item to read any of the real story and it kind of sucks. I think this would be a nice way for NewsBlur to improve these feeds.
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https://github.com/4poc/feedability - This does exactly what I’m wanting.
In the meantime, there appear to be a few services that we can funnel our RSS subscription through to enable this.
I’m now using the first one for Hacker News and it seems to work alright. The only thing I miss is that it replaces the original RSS item’s content with the fetched article instead of appending. I’d prefer to see both the original RSS item’s content as well as the fetched article.
http://fulltextrssfeed.com
http://www.feedsapi.com/
http://feedex.net
http://www.unsum.com/converter
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So you can use one of those services. I am working on a new Text view that fetches the original article and stores it. It’s a legal gray area, but it seems to be covered well by other services (Instapaper, etc). But it has to be an explicit user action.
I actually built this, but I don’t have the front-end for it. The issue is I have nowhere to put the Text tab. It’s technically part of Story, so maybe some way to combine those two? But the hard part is built and is going to be part of the shared story UI someday soon.