HEY BUDDY, CAN YOU DONGLE MY RSS?

Here’s a great piece by Robin Good at MNM

Sooner or later, and maybe without even knowing the
technical terms required to communicate this to someone else, you will
want to subscribe and monitor web sites, information pages, or online
catalog sections on an ongoing basis.

You have heard about RSS, webfeeds, Atom and other apparently not
too clear tech terms describing something that did sound like what you
are really in need of now, but even with all of your best will you
wouldn’t how or where to start given that those pages you have
identified do not sport any orange colored button or icon hinting to a
proper RSS feed.

Can do you generate an RSS feed for a web page that doesn’t have one?

Can anyone do this on her own?

The answer to both is a resounding YES!

Today, thanks to new “html scraping” services
available to everyone, RSS feeds can be automatically generated for
just about any web site, no matter what kind of layout, coding or
language it is written in. In some situations, to create a standard RSS
feed from any web page that does not have one may take less than a
minute, while in other cases, where your needs for customization are
higher, you may need to spend a little more time.

Morale of the story: any web page today can be made
to generate a RSS feed automatically. By the owner or, as it will
increasingly happen, by someone else who wants to be informed in
near-real-time of any news and content updates made on it.

Here the details:

HTML scraping or the ability to automatically
generate a standard RSS feed from a HTML document (a web page) that
does not have one has been a new type service under increasing demand
for over 2 years now.

Early services (e.g.: MyRSS) that offered HTML scraping later
disappeared or were replaced by other more profitable ones. Creating an
automatic RSS feed from a non-RSS enabled web page enables a number of
truly useful potential applications and I am sure that such services
will enjoy soon greater marketplace rewards.

FeedYes

FeedYes is the latest entry in this small group of online services
which allow anyone to create/ generate automatically a RSS feed for any
web page. FeedYes, has really found a simple and truly effective route
to simplify this task while providing good enough a solution to satisfy
most needs.

While it is not perfect, it is damn good and fast
at doing what it does. It is alos rather simple to use, and once you
have gone through it once, creating a second feed for another site, may
take literally only a few seconds.

FeedYes is a three-step
process that involves a) providing the URL of the page out of which an
automatic RSS feed needs to be created, b) indicating among the dynamic
links found by FeedYes on the specifiied URL, which one is the first
that refers to the content section that you are interested in (all web
pages have different content sections in the same page, and you
probably do not want to create a feed for the comments section or for
the most recent articles appearing on the same site), c) indicating in
the updated list of links FeedYes will spit out the last relevant link
pertaining to your selected content section.

In this way, FeedYes isolates with good precision (you are the one
effectively guiding) the specific content section you are interested in
(say the Latest News) and creates an RSS feed for it.

Feed43

Feed43 is an online service that
converts standard web pages or XML documents to RSS feeds. Feed43 does
so by extracting snippets of text or HTML by applying specific search
patterns to the document from which the feed needs to be extracted. The
search patterns help Feed43 understand exactly which content to grab
from a page and which not.

This allows for a much more precise control of what
will be contained in a feed at the expense of the ease of use and
accessibility of the overall product itself. For technically savvy
users this is in fact an excellent and very reliable approach to RSS
feed generation but for non-technical users Feed43 may scare off lots
of users in a matter of minutes.

In Feed43 the set of steps required to create a custom RSS feed for a web page that has none are as follows:
a) Identify the web page from which to generate a RSS feed.
b) Create a RSS feed on Feed43 pointing to that web page.
c) Define search patterns required.
d) Specify output templates required.
e) Generate the new RSS feed.

All feeds created with Feed43 are “public”, but optionally Feed43
also allows you to protect any newly created RSS feed with a password.
The service is free.

FeedFire

FeedFire is the oldest of these HTML-to-RSS services allowing anyone to automatically create a RSS news feed for any Web site that does not have one.

You simply register at FeedFire, input the URL of the page and
FeedFire dos the rest for you in the fraction of a second. All that’s
needed is a FULL URL to the page you would like to have made into RSS.
All bandwidth costs to host the new RSS feeds are absorbed by FeedFire.

FeedFire also allows to sponsor newly created RSS
feeds. this can be done by anyone like me and you, who are not major
corporations but people who are looking for a clever, considered and
comprehensively featured service that allows them to add extra reach,
exposure, visibility and unique content to others and/or to THEIR own
web site.

RSS feeds created and sponsored with FeedFire can also be made
private, and used for creating intelligence reports or RSS learning
objects or RSS newsmastering channels containing information otherwise
inaccessible to others.

Sponsored feeds can be further filtered by allowing the sponsor to
select only news items that “include” or do not have specific keywords.
It is also possible to customize the number of news items displayed in
the sponsored feed, the number of words per news item and even the
title and the description of the newly created RSS feed. The varying
levels of sponsorship have increasingly higher levels of features and
customisation.

Find out more.

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