There’s a new, fun aggregator out there: bubbles.town. I think the pitch is “like Hacker News, but for independent blogs instead of Silly Valley hucksters”. So it’s got upvoting and comments and all of that stuff.
Like Hacker News, it also has feeds. The feeds are nicer than on Hacker News — they have snippets of texts from the pages they link to:
But it’s only a snippet, so I wanted to make a fuller feed, like I’ve been making for Hacker News.
So here it is: Fuller Bubbles.
The source code is on Microsoft Github. I’ve just tweaked the original script a tiny bit more, and it works by going through the feed and then grabbing text from the original pages and putting that in there.
The point of all this is to be able to read the articles themselves in your favourite feed reader, i.e., in Gnus, reading from the Gwene NNTP server. (Isn’t that your favourite feed reader?! WELL I NEVER.)
See? All purty.
Of course, it doesn’t work reliably — it’s getting more difficult all the time do to web scraping, and especially from data centres (and that’s where this is running). But it works well enough for it to be worth it, I think.