Posted on: April 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil
The other night, I was working on installing a new RSS feed reader that is similar to Google Reader. I first found out about Google Reader from a friend (Chris) here at my University over a lunch. I then looked at it and discovered that it is much better than going to each and every blog site and reading the posts on each blog directly. This reader basically gathers all of the full text blogs and puts them in an email interface format, making it extremely easy and painless to read a bunch of RSS feeds while on the go (for me, on my windows mobile smart phone on the bus going to class or during dinner when I’m too lazy to get up and return to my room).
Anyways, I am not a real fan of using everything Google when I have an alternative that runs in ssh and doesn’t require an additional login (or saved password). I found 2 alternatives that run in ssh, one is snownews and the other is newsbeuter. Both of these programs are extremely simple and do exactly what google reader does, but they run in the SSH window like Pine or Pico does (Pine is an ssh email client, and pico is an ssh text editor). Snownews is not really good at reading rss feeds because it looks at the description tag of RSS 2.0 feeds which only puts a brief outline of the feed on the screen. Newsbeuter is much better and places the full content of a post on your screen like Google Reader does.
So, what does newsbeuter look like?
Here is the Main Screen, a main listing from a single rss feed, and a single blog post from an rss feed:
Newsbeuter is a great program, I’m willing to put up with no images, videos, and sometimes some gargled text to save time. As you probably know, I use public keys for ssh and and to get to this reader from my pine email takes a matter of seconds and no mouse movement. I’m slowly working on getting my instant mesengers to ssh, however we will see if that ever materializes.
So now onto my rant about partial vs full text feeds.
When I was configuring newsbeuter, my main concern was, “would it read a full feed that is in the rss file, or would it just show the description cropped by [...] like snownews did”. Because I compiled this on my server from source, I didn’t want to waste effort installing dependancies (a compiling problem) if it wouldn’t work in the end.
Luckily, it did read full rss feeds, except for John’s blog. I asked John what was different about his blog, and he told me he turned off full text rss feeds. His reasoning is, rss feeds make it very easy for someone else to post dynamic changing content on their own websites. While I totally understand this concern, I really wonder if it will kill off readership to his site, which I know he might eventually want to make money off from some day. I know for sure that I want famousphil.com to eventually make money for itself although I’m still debating how to put ads on it without hurting the design (which will be changing in a month or two again to make it easier to read).
I have looked at several blogs debating rull text vs partial text feeds (they aren’t hard to find), including the following:
- http://econsultancy.com/blog/018-rss-strategy-full-text-vs-partial-text-round-2
- http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004717.html. Although this site says the problem was fixed, I think it grabs my true feelings about partial feeds
- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_partial_text_rss_feeds.php “So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible — and that’s a bar that’s high and rising.” Thats how I feel (although I have yet to move many of my favorite feeds into newsbeuter.
For me, I will probably keep his blog on my feed list and look at his teasers. I will probably not actually read any more than his teasers though (mostly because I don’t have time to go look at these other sites that feel too smart to post a full feed). I don’t use other people’s content for my blogs normally without citing then adding significant material onto their blogs, therefore, I don’t consider myself a blog theif either. I do however visit other sites if I feel like leaving a comment 
Finally, with wordpress, if you use a “more” tag, this material will not show up on your blog feed. I will likely begin using this a bit (only after my site becomes eye friendly) because I do have long blogs and sometimes that material is an aid, but not necessary to know everything about my blog. If people want to read the aiding material, then they can then visit my site.
As for this blog, always expect a full feed, if there isn’t one, I will do everything I can to help. Comments are appreciated as always If you host with me, feel free to use these programs I mentioned as they are installed on the main server 
Tags: blog, content, description, feed, full, newsbeuter, partial, pico, pine, rss, snownews, ssh
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