Feed Bloater

In addition to fixing the RSS feed for this site, I also created a simple command-line tool named Feed Bloater which expands truncated RSS 2.0 feeds by doing the following:

1. Fetch the contents of the feed.
2. Fetch the HTML from the <link> for each feed item.
3. Filter the HTML from the previous step based on a CSS selector.
4. Replace the truncated item descriptions with the HTML from the previous step.
5. Write a new RSS feed to the given output path.

Feed Bloater maintains an internal cache and respects the ETag and Last-Modified headers, and by default it won’t update the output file if the source feed has not changed.

Here is an example that uses Feed Bloater to expand the truncated LLVM Weekly RSS feed:

feedbloater https://llvmweekly.org/rss.xml div.post path/to/llvmweekly.xml

Here’s what the original LLVM Weekly RSS feed looks like in The Old Reader:

Here’s what the expanded RSS feed generated by the example above looks like:

Much better! I’ve been happily using Feed Bloater to expand several truncated feeds for about a week.

If you’re interested in trying Feed Bloater, you can find installation, usage, and configuration instructions in the documentation on the Feed Bloater GitHub Repository.