XKCD + BeyondPod

On my Android phone, I use an app called “BeyondPod”.

BeyondPod is great because unlike Google Reader and Pulse (which are other great RSS readers), BeyondPod will download video and audio podcasts on a schedule.

What this means for me, is that at 2:30 AM, my phone will use my home ADSL2’s off-peak downloads and fetch a bunch of regular podcasts so when I wake up and make my way into work, I will have all the latest episodes of my favourite shows to watch and listen to on the train.

One of the feeds that I’m subscribed to is XKCD. If you look at the comics online, you probably already know that if hover your mouse over the image, you get to see an extra message about the comic.

On Google Reader, you can tap and hold the image and use the menu to get to the tooltip, but with BeyondPod, there is no such option.

This means that the tooltip is actually included in the feed, so I thought it would be pretty easy to write a little proxy that pulls out the title= attribute and appends it to the body.

Before I started coding, I thought that surely someone would have already done this, so after a quick Google search I came across a Yahoo! Pipe from “Benjamin Cook” that does exactly that.

Ben’s Pipe appends a <br /> and then the tooltip, but the <br /> seems to be getting escaped, so I copied the pipe and removed the <br /> and the end result was exactly what I wanted.

If you have a similar problem, you can add my version of the pipe to your reader and here’s what it’ll look like: