Of Feeds And Fragility

One of the (often flagged) problems with the way things are done these days - web 2.0, if you must - is that people end up reliant on other people's services. You may not have noticed, but the front page of husk.org now takes content from this feed, along with various other places where I'm active online, and aggregates them into a single stream.

This has all been working fine, but sometime recently - on Friday, I think - Vox decided that their feeds would default to excerpt-only, and they've also added a bunch of invitation cruft ("Send to a friend", that sort of thing) to each entry. It was easy enough - once I noticed - to swap back to the full feed, but cutting out the extra lines of HTML is a bit trickier, although I'm sure I'll manage. (I'll try to take the opportunity to add a touch of styling I've been meaning to do for ages).

I'm slightly annoyed that none of this was mentioned in the Team Vox release notes entry, but there you go. (I don't like the proliferation of "share" buttons either, but Vox are obviously trying to be "easy to use", and Flickr's gone down that road too, with "email this page " and "save to delicious" links, so one day I'll just get used to it and stop kvetching.) I suppose what I really need, though, is a script that alerts me every time the feeds change, and - this would be cleverer - if they change format significantly. Sigh. More work.

We now return to your previously scheduled lack of content. Probably.