I'm a fan of Flipboard and I use the IPad app on a daily basis to browse through Facebook updates, tweets, news and fresh images. I'm also a fan of Danish basketball and I need a way to follow the different Danish online basketball media on my IPad. So - why not aggregate online media feeds and pull them from Flipboard? The app works by adding different RSS feeds to Google Reader; however, pages in Flipboard look boring. No images. Missing descriptions here and there. That is not what I want. The magazine experience, please! So in order to get this, I've now remixed a few RSS feeds utilizing Yahoo Pipes and a bit of YQL. What I do is basically two things:
- If an RSS image is too small, pick up a bigger one if available
- Insert an image tag at the start of the RSS description field.
And now my feed looks just right. Two examples of Yahoo Pipes RSS rewrites:
A few observations along the way: Flipboard wants images to match the Flipboard design and filters out those images that do not meet the size requirements. After some trial and error, I think the image size rules are:
- Minimum 120 px width and 100 px height
- The ratio of width to height must be less than 200%, e.g., an image 200 px high can have a max width of 399 px
- If the image height is at least 300 px, rule #2 does not apply. I've seen 300 px high images with a 1500 px width.
You can try my test RSS feed here: http://feeds.stonor.dk/flipboard/flipboard-img.xml It also looks like images wrapped in div tags are filtered out. A clean img tag works best. However, I've not spent time exploring this in depth.
Good luck Flipboard-fixing your own feeds.
