Happy New Year. I've got a little present for everyone today. I've often been asked for full text feeds, and I've responded that this would only happen "at such time as someone writes an RSS client that gives a user experience at least equal to a real Web browser." I also stipulated that said client had to be open source and run on my platform of choice. Privacy invasive server side solutions like Bloglines need not apply.
Well about a month ago, that happened. Steve Palmer released Vienna 2, the first open source, client based web browser for the Mac that passes the "It doesn't suck" test. There are still a few minor user interface glitches, mostly related to keyboard shortcuts and panel focus; but overall reading feeds in Vienna is equal or superior to reading them in a browser. And thus I am ready to announce something new:
Cafe con Leche is now publishing a full text feed. This includes not only the complete text of today's news. It also includes the quote of the day, all recommended reading links, and all recent news. If you prefer to read this site in a feed reader like Vienna go right ahead. You won't miss anything.
The feed is valid Atom 1.0. Every hour or so, cron fires up an XSLT 1.0 stylesheet that scrapes this web page and generates the feed. If you'd like something added to the feed, holler. However, if your reader has trouble handling this feed, please file a bug with the reader vendor; or download a better reader like Vienna. I don't have the time or inclination to work around every bug in every feed reader on the planet.
Now one word of warning: Just because I'm publishing full text feeds does not mean I'm giving up my copyrights, any more than publishing a web page does. No one but me has the right to take my articles and republish them on another site. You're welcome to read them in your personal reader, just like you can read them in a web browser. I'm not going to get too worried if your personal reader is server based, like Bloglines. If you want to let someone track every article you read and every click you make, that's your business. But otherwise, republishing this content without prior permission is prohibited by U.S. and international law. The RSS summary feeds will remain available for any site that wants to aggregate the headlines from Cafe con Leche along with other sites. Full text, though, is available exclusively here.
