I created a new feed that shows the first 100 characters of the question

May 22, 2004 6:06 AM

I did not like the way the current AskMeFi RSS feed had the titles (Question xxx), so I created a new feed that shows the first 100 characters of the question as the title.

Here is the RSS 0.91 feed
posted by sebas to MetaFilter-related at 6:06 AM (6 comments total)

Cool Sebas. Thanks.

Just thinking out loud here, but since a lot of people (me for instance) put a lot of useless information at the beginning of the post, and don't get to the question until later, would it be possible to instead grab the hundred characters or so behind the question mark?

(Ha, this is what it feels like to be asked for a pony)
posted by Hildago at 10:08 AM on May 22, 2004

Hildago, I'm not too sure about that. I looked at some older questions and a lot of the time the text around the question mark does not have relevance to the question.

I'm sure there will be a smarter feed when AskMe v2 goes live, and there's a proper title tag or subject. My feed is just a quick hack.

If somebody wants to do better, I used Magpie to parse the feed, and anyone is more than welcome to use / change my source code (right click, save as).

(It is build your own pony day!)
posted by sebas at 11:17 AM on May 22, 2004

I'm sure there will be a smarter feed when AskMe v2 goes live

HAH! i happen to own a bridge in brooklyn you simply must buy.
posted by quonsar at 3:56 AM on May 23, 2004

Tell me more about this bridge, quonsar. I've got 20% of $45 MILLION DOLLARS coming to me once I settle some legal fees for the estate of the recently deceased President of Nigeria.
posted by filmgoerjuan at 9:19 AM on May 23, 2004

What's a good client to use for reading RSS feeds in Linux?
posted by bingo at 7:04 PM on May 23, 2004

Having done some further reading, I now realize that my last question doesn't really make sense. Also, I don't think I want to use RSS anyway.
posted by bingo at 10:14 AM on May 24, 2004