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rss feed service/generator Bucky 05-12-2006
Posted by Bucky on May 12, 2006, 12:53 pm
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Is there a free service out there that you can give them a URL, and
they will generate an RSS feed for it?

My usage is that there are some websites that do not have RSS feeds.
They only update their content every few days, so I don't like to keep
checking it. I want to generate an RSS feed for it and add it to
Bloglines so I'll know when it's been updated.


Posted by Andy Dingley on May 12, 2006, 3:23 pm
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>Is there a free service out there that you can give them a URL, and
>they will generate an RSS feed for it?

No (at least not usefully).


The reason that RSS exists is that it's _hard_ to scrape a HTML site and
identify the useful content on it. RSS is about the _author_ putting the
content-rich content into the feed, without the presentational guff, so
that only the juicy bit has to be shipped around. The closer you do this
to the author, the easier it is and the better it works.

It's easy to make a HTML -> RSS convertor. It's even likely to work
pretty well for well-designed sites. But it will fail almost completely
for what are still the majority of sites, and so it's a fool's errand to
build such a scraper, let it loose for the pubic to use, then sit back
while free-loading users whinge that it doesn't work on their favourite
site and what a rubbish tool you've built -- when this is the fault of
the content site, not the tool.

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 12, 2006, 3:36 pm
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__/ [ Bucky ] on Friday 12 May 2006 17:53 \__

> Is there a free service out there that you can give them a URL, and
> they will generate an RSS feed for it?
>
> My usage is that there are some websites that do not have RSS feeds.
> They only update their content every few days, so I don't like to keep
> checking it. I want to generate an RSS feed for it and add it to
> Bloglines so I'll know when it's been updated.

I was in precisely the same situation as yourself, which is why I created and
shared the following: http://schestowitz.com/Software/Syndication/ . It
requires a POSIX-compliant environment like BSD/GNU/Linux/UNIX/OS X, or even
Cygwin on Windows, if not virtualisation.

If you had control over the sites that you wish to track, things would be
greatly simplified. There are tools that can generated XML site maps
automatically.

Hope it helps...

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