Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Sneaking feeds from the PD

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch website is a bit of usability nightmare, but most vexing is its spotty use of RSS feeds. You can generally get news headlines and section headlines, but they're not full-text feeds and they have a firehose approach (for example, you can get a feed of all columnists but not just pick and choose your favorites).

Last year, the paper launched a bunch of blogs and they continue to roll out others. Powered by WordPress, the PD Blog Zone is as frustrating to navigate as the rest of the site and its feed selection is no exception. If you rely on auto-discovery, you wind up with a feed of comments from all blogs, not the original content. The individual blogs have no obvious links to their feeds either.

But last week, I accidentally discovered how to trick the PD into giving up its blog feeds: Just take the address of the blog and append /feed/ to the end. So, for example, if you're a transit geek like me and want to follow the new Driver's Seat blog, the feed address would be http://www.stltoday.com/blogs/news-the-drivers-seat/feed/. Alas, they're still not full-text but at least they provide a few lines whenever the site updates.

Are the blogs themselves any good? It's a mixed bag. The Driver's Seat is new and largely focused on the roads (necessarily, given the current mania around the I-64 reconstruction), but there are occasional public transit and Metro tidbits and it may improve with both breadth and depth in time. I've only sampled a few of the others and haven't found anything else particularly feedworthy to stick into my NetNewsWire yet.