Survival Kit For Scoble’s Shared Items

Adrian Sutton

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Videos embedded regularly (Robert himself is the biggest pain for this). We have this thing called a hyperlink….
  3. 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.