Survival Kit For Scoble’s Shared Items
A huge amount of the items that flow through my news reader come from Robert Scoble's shared items feed. Most I skip, but there's enough good stuff in there that makes it well worth reading. It keeps me abreast of a much wider range of topics than I would normally read.
The trouble is, Robert doesn't seem to have as low a tolerance level for crap in feeds that I do. Generally I'll unsubscribe from a feed if it has:
- Ads in it. Particularly if they move in any way, shape or form - generally including just being an image since it flashes up after I've started reading the content due to the download time.
- Videos embedded regularly (Robert himself is the biggest pain for this). We have this thing called a hyperlink….
- Partial content.
Fortunately, NetNewsWire support custom stylesheets for displaying feed entries so I can use CSS to fix most of these annoyances. The CSS I use is below - pretty sure I've pulled various bits of it from different places.
/* Hide stupid feedburner ad to this and that links */
img[src^="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/"] { display: none !important;}
img[src^="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/"] { display: none !important;}
img[src^="http://feeds.feedburner.com/"] { display: none !important;}
a[href*="adclick.php"] { display: none !important;}
a[href*="/~f/"] > img[src^="http://feeds."] { display: none !important;}
a[href*="/~a/"] > img[src^="http://feeds."] { display: none !important;}
.wlWriterSmartContent { display: none !important; }
.feedflare { display: none !important; }
table[cellpadding="6"] td[bgcolor^="#ffffeb"] { display: none !important; }
a[href^="http://dynamic.fmpub.net"] { display: none !important; }
a[href^="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo"] { display: none !important; }
/* Get rid of techcrunch video ads. */
div[style^="width:364px"] { display: none !important; }
/* Hide annoying Scoble videos. */
div.snap_preview embed { display: none !important; width: 0 !important; height: 0 !important;}
Thank goodness WebKit support complex CSS selectors…. One note, to get rid of embed tags, you have to set the height and width to 0, not just set display: none which is rather annoying.
November 29th, 2007 at 9:31 am
I agree, except for embeds. I love being able to watch embedded videos without opening a new browser tab :P
And now that you mention it I should request something like this for FeedDemon… :)
November 29th, 2007 at 9:51 am
If you actually *want* to watch the video it’s useful, so the CSS above doesn’t block YouTube videos, but Scoble just can’t help but include a video on nearly every post and they’re usually way too long to watch while in the middle of sorting through feeds. Even worse, the PodTech video player animates through all the comments on the video - hate speech and foul language included. It’s never good to be distracted by that kind of stuff while you’re trying to read the actual post content.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Of course I put this on my shared items feed. Thanks! I’ll try to be better about the video stuff.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Robert,
Video is what you do - for you, video is the best way to distribute information in a lot of cases, for me I find video tedious and almost always a poor choice. I wouldn’t expect you to post videos less, just like noone would expect me to talk about editors less. I’m just glad I get a choice whether or not to have those videos display.
Though, I would suggest PodTech rethink the animating comments function of the viewer - particularly before the video is played. Some of the names it’s called me is quite insulting and it’s not immediately clear that it’s a user comment rather than PodTech just not liking me. :)
November 29th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
You are all idiots… the ads it what pays the bloggers ;(