Hate the way the BBC gives you only half the news when you subscribe to their news feeds? I do. So does Duncan Barnes. And he has made a script to mend it. The script will provide full feeds from the front page or any of the subsections.
Brilliant work, Duncan. Next stop The Guardian… (hint)
Also, while Duncan’s script works beautifully, it rather depends on the capacity of his poor server (or his service provider). Time for the BBC to step up, eh.
I was thinking just the same thing this morning!
It’s particularly frustrating as I track news from Kent for work, but the short excerpts always refer to “Kent town…” or “…a Kent village” meaning I have to click through before knowing where the stories refer to.
I wonder why the BBC does it? After all the content is available free, so why not deliver it in a way people want?
For me the practice of partial feeds to drive click through is associated with creating volume traffic to the main site to push up ad revenue, but this isn’t the case with bbc.co.uk
cheers,
sw
Cheers Ian,
Yes I am working to speed up the script a bit but as you suggested I am on a shared server at the moment so it is sometimes limited!
Once I’ve done this I can then perhaps apply the same technique to the guardian although the BBC have a more relaxed attitude to this sort of action than the guardian may have so I’ll have to check how much I’ll get bashed before I do it!
The main thing that annoyed me was that I had on multiple occasions contacted the BBC web team about adding full feeds but have had no response of any sort. At the same time I can appreciate that they get a lot of emails so its to be expected that it was overlooked!
You won’t get any bashing round these parts, Duncan. You’re the Robin Hood of RSS!
Simon: it’s weird. I’ve talked to Ian Forrester of BBC backstage whose whole job is to encourage and enable public access to BBC resources, yet there seems to be a real lack of wider strategy at a higher level.
