Minor RSS feed irritation squashed…

So here I am using Omea Reader to handle my RSS feeds.  It doesn’t seem like it has been updated in forever. I do keep my eye out for new and exciting developments in client-based RSS feed readers. So far nothing I’ve found yet exceed the capabilities I need that Omea can’t handle.

I’m following something like 200-230 RSS/Atom feed sources with it.  On an average day that will translate to about 500-600 articles to clear.

Note: that sounds pretty bad but I do also watch them on my iPhone with my Reeder 2 ($$) app. during the work-day so I can pick-out the ones I want to focus on and then cull down the bulk of them when I get home with some speed-feed-reading.

I do dread getting backed up at work or sick because when I’m too worn out to check my feed list daily, I can have close to 2000 articles to review and pick out what I want to spend more time on.

Anyway…that long introduction to say that in Omea, I’ve noticed that some article feeds appear multiple times despite having just as single feed link to pull from.

That ends up generating additional “bulk” in my feed list to have to clear.

Case in point…and the solution…the feed for ArchDaily.

I love design and architecture…both modern structure design as well as older buildings as well. Some stuff I just don’t get and others the design can really evoke an emotional response out of me.

When I browse to the site in Firefox (or IE) and select the RSS feed icon it presents me with the following RSS feed source:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArchDaily

And that’s the one I have been using. Omea Reader accepted it and it looks quite normal…only when it loads the pulled articles, I have triples!  [Well really a double of the article is displayed with a third being the same article but for “comments”.]

Couple that feed article pulling behavior with the fact that the site produces many, many articles per day and I can have a lot of “fluff” in my unread feed count to sort though and clear.

Weird.  Especially so as I have my Omea feed setting for ArchDaily to not accept duplicates of the same article (it can do that).

Also, my feed entry for ArchDaily does have the Feedburner favicon showing, but the three articles have one Feedburner icon and two ArchDaily favicons.

Look Ma! Three for the price of one!

When I click the RSS icon on some sites, I may be offered feed link options to RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, ATOM, or a feed source just for comments.  For ArchDaily I just get the feedburner link.

So this morning I browsed to ArchDaily over in Firefox again and this time launched the site with Firebug running so I could take a look at the page code.

Guess what I saw?

Yep. Two RSS feed page references that didn’t have anything to do with Feedburner; http://www.archdaily.com/feed/rss/

Hmm.

So I copied that feed link, deleted the Feedburner one I had originally in Omea and recreated it with the discovered alternative RSS feed link, and hit refresh.

Voilla!

One RSS feed article per post, the correct favicon, and a lot less overhead.

I have a few other feeds like this one that do doubles so I’m off to repeat the process of looking on the page-code for alternative RSS feed links.

So if you are an RSS feed junkie and the RSS option being offered is wonky, take a shot at exploring the page code and you just might get lucky and find a better “unpublished” feed source link

Cheers,

Claus V.