Monitoring a news-like website without a RSS feed
Apr 10th, 2007 by admin
A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me about an efficient way to monitor an auction website for new tenders. The site didn’t offer a RSS feed so it was not possible just to use a feed reader. This inspired me to perform a quick search on free feed creation tools, ie tools that take a web page and produce a feed out of it.
From the programming point of view a task of implementing a feed creation tool sounds trivial: all that’s needed is to extract links together with their captions from a given page. But the output of the tools I tested was not always perfect: the most common issue was the existence of “garbage” news items that in fact didn’t point to any news. After trying out a few solutions I decided that FeedYes is a good compromise between functionality and ease of use. The user just enters page URL and then can define which items on the page are the news items and which ones are to be ignored – all of this is done just by clicking on them. When the feed is ready, the user obtains its URL and can enter it into any feed reader.
On a side note: As the feed creation service has a fixed Internet address, it can easily be blocked by a website owner that doesn’t accept such way of accessing the site’s content (eg because he lives by ad publishing). However, there is no easy way to block a similar service running directly on the reader’s computer. In fact it is surprising that popular feed readers don’t offer the feed creation functionality; it would not only be more convenient but also impossible to be blocked.