This one is especially for Tim Tripcony and anybody else who prefers to remain in their feed-reader while catching up on new postings on their favourite sites.

Until today on codestore you had to actually visit the site if you wanted to read my posting. If you were lucky I'd have remembered to add a one-liner summary to try and tempt you in, but often all you had to go on was the title itself.

The trouble with using the title alone is that (at least I find) it's almost impossible to come up with one that summarises it all in a catchy way. I spend way to much time obsessing over the title of a post sometimes - changing words over and over.

Well now, due to popular demand (you can probably tell if you've got this far and you're still in Google Reader or the likes) I've supplied the full body of the blog entry via RSS. Unless you want to post a comment (for which I given you a handy "button" to press at the bottom of each item) there's no actual need to visit the site.

So, why has it taken me so long to make this change? The answer's in the last paragraph -- that you don't need to visit the site. My concern with full-content RSS feeds is that my visitors never actually, err, visit. This means they never get to see the site I put so much time in to designing. Purely selfish, I know and no reason to force people to visit.

The obvious side effect to this is that I lose visitors who don't like taking the gamble that something is worth their time to read based on what the title tells them. Hence my about turn. I might as well get the content I write to as many people as possible hadn't I?!

There was another, more practical, reason not to supply full content. All the internal links in my blogs are relative to the BASE href tag in the page's Head. Likewise for inline images. Links start with "unid/" and images with "rsrc/" both of which are the names of sorted views.

The trouble is that once downloaded to the RSS feed it doesn't know what the BASE href is and so links and inline resource files become broken. Take the link in the last paragraph for example. If you examine it on the site itself you'll see it points to unid/EPSD-52UQZJ?OpenDocument. If you examine the link in the RSS feed you'll see it points directly to http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/EPSD-52UQZJ?OpenDocument.

So how did I got about this without using nasty hard-coded absolute links in the actual stored content?

All I did was add an @ReplaceSubstring() to the RSS view. Blog posts on this site are just HTML stored in a plain old text field. All I needed to add to the RSS feed's view was this:

@ReplaceSubstring(
        @Implode(Body; @NewLine);
        "=\"rsrc/":"=\"unid/"; 
        "=\"http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/rsrc/":"\"http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/"
);

It seems safe to assume that any occurrence of the strings ="rsrc/" or ="unid/" are either a link or an image, respectively. Seems foolproof to me and, more importantly, it works. To prove it here's an image, which just happens to be an image of what the feed now looks like in FeedDemon:

Notice the preview image of the laptop that FeedDemon provides when the item is collapsed. All very cool.

So I hope we're all happy now? If you have any more requests just ask.