Stefan Fischerländer’s Blog One Blog Is Not Enough

Sometimes the simplest looking tasks can become complicated, especially when modern computers are involved. Today I tried to examine the source code of some RSS feeds. Safari shows me a very nice HTMLified version of the feed. Of course this is useful for most of the Safari users, but it can get in your way when you try to develop a RSS based web application. But any up-to-date computer geek has more than one browser installed, so I fired up Firefox and tried to access the feed. Wow, even Firefox tries to be smarter than me and redirects me to my Bloglines account. (I’m sure this is a feature I’ve activated some time ago, but have no idea how to switch it off.)

Having a nice command line at hand, there should be an easy way to look at an RSS feed, but wget displays just some crap, if I redirect its output to STDOUT. But wait, I forgot to make wget quiet. And really, now it works and it’s a very simple way to look at my RSS feeds:
wget -qO- http://www.fischerlaender.net/feed | less

Update:
There’s even a way to get syntax highlighting! If you’ve installed a reasonably up-to-date version of vi(m), there is a script called less.sh in your $VIMRUNTIME directory, which acts as an replacement of less providing syntax highlighting.

To use this script on Mac OS X Tiger, you just have to follow these simple steps:

• Launch vi and type :echo $VIMRUNTIME. This shows you the path to the
  vi files. On my MacBook this is /usr/share/vim/vim62.
• Now execute sudo ln -s /usr/share/vim/vim62/macros/less.sh /usr/bin/vless. If you’ve
  got another path before, you have to edit this command appropriately.
• That’s all. Now vless acts nearly as less with syntax highlighting.

Of course, vless can also be used within shell pipes:
wget -qO- http://www.fischerlaender.net/feed | vless

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