Quite a few of my friends and relatives make use of Blogger/Blogspot for their weblogs. While Blogger seems to be a great service and very easy to use, what annoys me is that RSS feeds are often disabled on Blogger weblogs. Maybe people are setting this on purpose, maybe they are turning off RSS feeds unintentionally, or maybe that is the default. Either way, I read all of my news and blogs in an RSS reader. Friends & family blogs and photo-streams make up about 25 of the 100+ feeds I subscribe to. If a blog doesn’t have an RSS feed for me to subscribe to, I’m never going to remember to read it.
So, my work-around for Blogger was to write a screen-scraping RSS generator that creates an RSS feed from a Blogger weblog. BlogspotRSS is a simple PHP5 script that makes use of XPATH queries to turn the Blogger weblog into an RSS document. If you have a web server with PHP5, please download BlogspotRSS and run it on your own web server to save my bandwidth.
The BlogspotRSS script is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Notes:
- It seems that some of the Blogger themes change the HTML quite a bit. I’ll have to fix up the RSS generator to make it work with a few more themes than the ones I tested it on…
