Dan Q

Tag: bbc

Daily Mail RSS that doesn’t suck

Off the back of my project to un-suckify BBC News’ RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) by removing non-news content and duplicate items, I received an email this week (addressing me by the wrong name, I might add) from somebody who asked if I could do the same… for the Daily Mail.

I’m so very tempted to provide an empty RSS feed and say “there you go; that’s an RSS feed of the Daily Mail but with the crap bits removed”.

Turns out my distaste for the Daily Mail is greater than my love of clean RSS.

Email from Simon G to Dan Q, subject "Dail Mail RSS that doesn't suck", with message: Hey Darren, I’ve come across your BBC RSS feeds and find them really useful over the last few days. Thank you so much for this!! I’m not sure how easy it is but could you do something similar with the Daily Mail as that has thousands of reposts a week? Happy to contribute/donate.

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Note posted at UTC on .

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BBC Sports News (without the crap)

For the last few years I’ve been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content, non-news content, and (optionally) sports news.

This weekend, for the first time, somebody asked if it could produce an edition that included only the sports content. Which turned out to be slightly more difficult, because it’s the kind of scope-creep that my “uninterested-in-sports-news” brain couldn’t conceive that anybody would want! But I got there in the end.

If anybody’s looking for their fill of “BBC News Feeds… But Better!”, give it a look.

Note posted at UTC on .

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Note #25736

After “fixing” BBC News’ RSS feeds I noticed that I was seeing less news (and, somehow, stressing less over everything happening in the USA). Turns out that in switching myself to my new system I’d subscribed to the UK edition, whereas previously I’d been on the Full edition. I’ve corrected it now in my RSS reader, but it was an interesting couple of days.

tl;dr: I accidentally stopped reading international news and I was less stressed

Anyway: if you’re not already using my improved BBC News RSS feeds, they’re at: https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev

Note posted at UTC on .

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BBC News RSS… your way!

It turns out my series of efforts to improve the BBC News RSS feeds are more-popular than I thought. People keep asking for variants of them, and it’s probably time I stopped hosting the resulting feeds on my NAS (which does a good job, but it’s in a highly-kickable place right under my desk).

Screenshot of BBC News RSS Feeds (that don't suck!).
The new site isn’t pretty. But it works.

So I’ve launched BBC-Feeds.DanQ.dev. On a 20-minute schedule, it generates both UK and World editions of the BBC News feeds, filtered to remove iPlayer, Sounds, app “nudges”, duplicates, and other junk, and optionally with the sports news filtered out too.

The entire thing is open source under an ultra-permissive license, so you can run your own copy if you don’t want to use mine.

Enjoy!

BBC News RSS… with the sport?

There’s now a much, much better version of this. Go use that instead: bbc-feeds.danq.dev.

Earlier today, somebody called Allan commented on the latest in my series of several blog posts about how I mutilate manipulate the RSS feeds of BBC News to work around their (many, and increasingly so) various shortcomings, specifically:

  1. Their inclusion of non-news content such as plugs for iPlayer and their apps,
  2. Their repeating of identical news stories with marginally-different GUIDs, and
  3. All of the sports news, which I don’t care about one jot.

Well, it turns out that some people want #3: the sport. But still don’t want the other two.

FreshRSS screenshot with many unread items, but focussing on a feed called "BBC News (with sport)" and showing a story titled: 'How England Golf's yellow cards are tackling blight of slow play'
Some people actually want to read this crap, apparently.

I shan’t be subscribing to this RSS feed, and I can’t promise I’ll fix it if it gets broken. But if “without the crap, but with the sports” is the way you like your BBC News RSS feed, I’ve got you covered:

So there you go, Allan, and anybody in a similar position. I hope that fulfils your need for sports news… without the crap.

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Article posted at UTC on .

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