Dilbert.com Hates Its Users
Dilbert.com recently messed up their web comic RSS feed that I use to read the comic every day. They did this so that you have to click through to the website
to read each and every comic. All you can see is what’s to the right here.
Penny-Arcade did this quite a while back too, and I’ve been using someone’s Yahoo Pipe that fixes this same problem unfortunately this pipe no longer worked anyway and is replaced below. It just pulls the comic strip images from the page and displays it instead. I never dug into how it worked or Yahoo Pipes at all.
Yahoo Pipes is pretty awesome. It lets you just drag and drop things and connect them to arrange a workflow. I’m a developer, but I don’t think you have to be to use Pipes.
Using the Penny-Arcade one as an example, I rigged up two versions of the Dilbert.com feed.
Using my Google App Engine hosted new software project, I’ve replaced and added new feeds below. The feeds auto-update every 2 hours and the service serves cached copies, so it should be extremely fast compared to the old pipes feeds.
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Dilbert
- Modified Atom Feed
- Transformed (from Atom) Modified RSS Feed. This is a hack. Only use this if you have programmatic requirements requiring RSS over Atom.
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Penny-Arcade
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W.T. Duck
- Modified RSS Feed. This was requested by a reader previously.
What It Looks Like Now With These Modified Feeds
I no longer use The Old Reader. I now use NewsBlur and I pay for a premium subscription. I find it to be the best news reader for serious RSS users now. You can follow me there.
Now you get comics back the way they used to be (including images) and don’t have to link out to the site to read it. You can click the title in your feed reader to open the comic’s page (for discussion or other purposes).
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