Your friend sends you a link to some website - after digging for few minutes, you seem to enjoy the contents and like to subscribe to the site's RSS feed in your newsreader. But there's a small problem - the site owner is not providing RSS feeds for users to syndicate the content. What do you do in such a case ?
Simple - create the RSS feed yourself [no programming required]. Mukarram from Delhi wants something similar and is looking for a solution to convert these HTML only webpages to RSS feeds.
There are at least two good services that are absolutely free and can get the job done in few clicks. Here they are:
Feed43 (pronounced as "Feed For Free") is one such free service that can help you monitor any site for new content right from the comfort of your newsreader.
FeedYes - another popular Website to RSS feed service that even lets you tag the feeds. You type in the site URL and immediately get the RSS feed. There are options to finetune the results.
And yes, there are some other good advantages of these services as well like you can track Google search results or comments on blogs that don't offer separate comment feeds.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/02/when-your-favorite-website-doesn-offer.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Maybe the reason there are no feeds is that he doesnt want people to be able to syndicate his/her content and in that case these sites are doing nothing short of stealing content.
Anyway if i were a webmaster and dont want syndication i would be vary about IPs accessing my site regularly and in same monotonous pattern. Qute a few bots actually used to syndicate one of my earlier sites and i blocked them using htaccess one by one. NUISANCE these are !
Written on 1/2/07 10:34 PM
I've literally sent hundreds of email messages to webmasters of feedless sites, suggesting they'd add RSS feeds. In some cases there weren't any feeds available at all, in others the feeds weren't granular enough for my taste. Usually these are traditional publishers or large enterprises who haven't yet seen the light. The more we educate them about the essence of making feeds available, the more likely they'll implement the technology.
The problem with feed scrapers—of course—is that they won't follow along if the layout of the original page inadvertently changes.
I've personally started to use InfoMinder lately - http://www.infominder.com - a page monitoring service that delivers RSS feeds and also points out the differences since the last update to the page. I highly recommend it.
Written on 2/2/07 1:53 AM
nice post, and helpful software links yes having rss feeds on news and blogs helps the readers keep themselves updated very efficently.
Will look into further softwares mentioned in the comments, keep up the good work
Written on 4/2/07 10:38 PM
Feed43 works great! Thanks for the info.
Written on 5/2/07 5:59 AM
I use www.feedity.com which is also a really simple and good tool
Written on 6/2/07 7:29 AM
Have a look at Dapper: http://www.dapper.net/
Works really great.
Written on 25/8/07 9:58 PM