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Comment by eloeffler | Hacker News Reader

Is there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish teasers?

When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article.

Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a good tool for that...

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For what it's worth: When I first launched my Wordpress-based website back in 2005, I initially had it set up to post full articles to the RSS feed. Soon, however, a major downside appeared: It became absolutely trivial for other sites to reproduce my content, and they did in droves. My writings appeared all over the web on generic Wordpress sites, usually attributed to other people. After grappling with the problem for a few months I gave up and switched the RSS to only publish intros, and that mostly resolved it.

Sure, it is always possible for a human to copy and paste my articles' text to their CMS, or for someone to write a simple scraper to extract the desired content. But both of those solutions introduce various hassles, and they require a human to fully accept that they are stealing content, which much fewer people are willing to do.

HN is not the place to fanboy over things, but your stories never fail to surprise me. Thanks for continuing on and making the podcast, too.

On this day a fartcannon made me feel appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: I hope this didn't come off as flippant; it is refreshing to receive encouraging words without the all-too-common "but I don't like how you do such-and-such".

Not at all flippant! As for 'constructive' compliments, I think the old information superhighway analogy of the internet is applicable because there sure is a lot of roadrage on the net.

Yes, it totally makes sense.

I hold no grudge against news sites or anyone who chooses to publish teasers either. And be it only because they need statistics on which articles are more or less popular. Or ad revenue...

Unfortunately the negative effect for my end remains. Sometimes there is no ideal solution for everyone, I guess.

Indeed. As is too often the case, a few bad actors ruin an otherwise elegant solution.

I'm not affiliated but I use both of these services and seem to do a good job:

- https://morss.it/

- http://ftr.fivefilters.org/

The premium version of Unread[1], an iOS and iPad OS feed reader has this feature. It's also a generally beautiful reading experience.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unread-an-rss-reader/id1363637...

I'm always interested to hear what people think regarding full text feeds versus headline/summary feeds.

I hand-edit my feed, so the brief summary is easiest for me to keep up to implement. I've also always felt that it was a bit wacky to send, like, everything I've ever written as one huge XML document just so people could check for updates...

On the flip side, I have no problem with any automated service that downloads the full article for real human readers/subscribers. I have no advertising or tracking, so arguably they're saving me bandwidth. :-)

Some self hosted RSS readers do that. I use Miniflux and you can set css selectors to fetch original content. It does not work when the article is a link to something (like this thread on HN)

Nice, thank you! I'll check out if it's viable to host that locally on my phone.

https://github.com/Dither/full-text-rss

https://github.com/alrs/full-text-rss-docker

Yup, Inoreader.

Inoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to create feeds for sites that do not publish via rss.

> Inoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to create feeds for sites that do not publish via rss.

I am a paid pro subscriber on Inoreader, and use it 2-3 hours a day for my work. I should mention that it provides a very limited number of certain types of feed (custom-created RSS, Twitter feeds, etc.), and you'll run out of them almost immediately if you want to follow a lot of places.

That said, Inoreader lets you plug as many RSS feeds as you like in, far as I can tell, and I've really loaded it up.

But do watch out for the limits, because the next grade up from 'Pro' is 'Call sales'. It's not very granular.

Just checked Inoreader's pricing plans and it looks like pro level gets you 20 custom-created rss feeds before you need to call for custom pricing.

NewsBlur does (for paying customers for sure; perhaps free users too)

Newspaper project for Python might help.

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