Help me see the original format of the blogs I subscribe to.

April 16, 2009 2:19 PM

Is there an RSS reader (or something along those lines) that will allow me to view the blog in its original format?

I subscribe to Google Reader, which I love, however I miss not seeing the blog formats and colors and side links to other blogs and extras. The side links are my favorite! Like hidden treasures, but overall I would like a way to preserve the intended view of the blog while organizing them into one place! Too much to ask? Or do I need to go back to my handy dandy favorites list...that I can only view from my own computer?

posted by kgreerRN to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I believe you are. Other readers than Google's have the ability to change the style of a feed, but I haven't seen one that does it on a feed by feed basis. You might have been able to the side blog in a separate feed, but I don't believe there is an RSS of it.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 2:28 PM on April 16

And by are, I mean you are asking too much :p.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 2:29 PM on April 16

Technically, RSS is intended to formalize away the "website" crap you're asking for. However, I use Liferea, and there's an option to automatically load the full website when you select an entry. This is handy for those shitty, incomplete blog RSS's.
posted by pwnguin at 2:30 PM on April 16

NetNewsWire has been doing this for years on Mac OS X. I suspect that NewsGator does the same for those unfortunate folks who choose to use WinXP or Vista.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 2:53 PM on April 16

You're in luck! There's a Greaseonkey script for Google Reader that will open the full HTML web page inside a text box within each item -- I've used it for months and love it.

Screenshot

You can get Greasemonkey (if you don't have it already) here, and install the userscript here.

And a protip: there are certain feeds that you might prefer viewing in the simplified RSS version. To exclude them from the script, edit it ("Tools > Greasemonkey > Manage User Scripts..."), delete everything in the text file, and replace it with the content of the text box at the bottom of this page.

After that, find the part in the code with:

href.lastIndexOf("foo")==-1 &&
href.lastIndexOf("foo2")==-1 &&
href.lastIndexOf("foo3")==-1 &&
href.lastIndexOf("foo4")==-1

You can change the "foo", "foo2", "foo3", etc., to the URL of the feed you want to exclude. To add more, just copy one of the lines ending with "&&" and paste it on a new line just below.

Good luck!
posted by Rhaomi at 3:07 PM on April 16

Shrook does this really well, and synchronizes between multiple Macs and your iPhone.
posted by nicwolff at 3:25 PM on April 16

Netvibes does allow you to see the original pages in the feed (on a feed-by-feed basis).

It does a whole lot more as well (with widgets for a ton of different services), but for me it's primarily an attractive, easy-to-use reader.
posted by not.so.hip at 4:16 PM on April 16

Are we using the same Google Reader? That's rhetorical, of course we are, we don't have a choice. As folks mentioned above, RSS is intended to make every syndication display identically, this is a feature.

However, I'll skim the RSS capsule summaries from AskMeFi and then press the circular button to the right of the headline with the ">>" inside it. That button pops me to the green page just as if I had surfed http://ask.metafiler.com directly.

Have I grossly misunderstood your question?
posted by fydfyd at 5:05 PM on April 16

Also, the effect that Rhaomi can be attained without Greasemonkey using the Better GReader extension for Firefox from Lifehacker
posted by mysterious1der at 7:47 PM on April 16