RSS Replay

rssreplay.heroku.com

23 points·pw··8 comments

Many feeds are limited to the last X posts. (How) does this workaround that? Are there some big feed archives or caches on the web?

It uses the PostRank API, which looks like it has historical data for feeds that PostRank has previously analyzed. So maybe it can provide archived data for some feeds (but not all)? http://apidocs.postrank.com/Feed-Engagement-API

EDIT: For all the feeds I tried, it just started with the most recent item, not the first. So it's like having a DVR for feeds - you can time-shift them to watch later, but you can't go back and "record" things that happened in the past.

I'd really like to create a similar service that crawls the site itself and uses heuristics to figure out the right order for all of the archived posts/entries.

Good point. For one of the feeds I tried, I got something like the following: "Feed not found. PostRank will try to index it, so try again in a few minutes." Also if you look at PostRank Topics (http://www.postrank.com/main), you can see rankings for posts older than what's present in a site's RSS feed. So it does seem to do some archiving.

This is a fantastic idea, I often come across an old blog that I want to read through chronologically.

Edit: Something like this build into Google Reader would be great.

There's a specific version of this for webcomics called Archive Binge.

http://www.archivebinge.net/

I don't know if this is all that interesting to hackers, but I've found it entertaining.

Great idea. Is it possible that it's better suited as a feature of an RSS reader?

Does not appear to support https feeds. Eg, mine:

https://secure.grepular.com/rss

tad sad I did't know about this years ago, thinking of all the things I wish could have lasted longer. oh well.

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