FeedFlare: Printer-Friendly view

UPDATE: I have switched web hosts and can no longer host this Rails app in a running form. You can still download it and use it yourself.

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I got the itch to do some more coding recently, so I decided to knock out a FeedFlare I had planned on doing for a while: Printer-Friendly view, #90 on FeedBurner’s list of 101 Flares. What it does is hardly a mystery: it generates a simple, printer-friendly view of a given item in your feed. Here’s a working example.

How can I use this for myself?

If your blog is powered by Typo, the blogging engine written in Ruby on Rails, this will work for you “out of the box.” Just do the following:

1. Login to your FeedBurner account.
2. Go to the Optimize tab.
3. Click FeedFlare in the left menu.
4. Copy/paste this URL (http://rossbelmont.com/printerfriendly.xml) into the text box under Personal Flare and click Add New Flare.
5. Scroll down to the bottom and click Save. (This is easy to forget.)

If you’re using one of the other, more popular blogging engines, you’ll need to download the code and run it on your own server. I have a very run-of-the-mill shared hosting account, so attempting to keep this service up for everyone on the Internet is not a great idea. (Not that many people use Typo, so I figure I’m OK here.)

That being said, if you do plan to run the code on your own, just get in touch with me by posting a comment and I’d be happy to help you change the code to work with your blogging platform.

This doesn’t seem to work for me.

Again, this is probably because the XML format of your blog’s feed is slightly different than the format expected by the code. For example, I know that the output from WordPress has slightly different structure.

You can also try to “debug” this to some extent with your web browser. If you’re having issues, hit this URL:

http://rossbelmont.com/printerfriendly/display?↵
feedUrl=YOUR_FULL_FEED_URL_HERE&↵
itemUrl=YOUR_ITEM_PERMALINK_HERE

This provides a way to preview what your printer-friendly view will look like outside the context of FeedFlare.

How does this work?

It’s another fun little Rails app…you know, the kind I’m so fond of making? Anyway, it makes an HTTP call to pull down the feed itself, then does some XML parsing to look for the item that matches the permalink. Then, it displays the core item data in a simple web page. Done and done.

So, put another FeedFlare up on the big board. And, please leave comments if you have any.