RSS/Content Syndication From Sites Without Feeds- Does This Exist? Please Let Me Know

Posted on September 4th, 2008 by Nathan Burke

So, here goes. I want to know if such a technology exists.

1. Go to a page. Let’s say it’s this:

Yahoo News:

For the sake of this example, let’s pretend that Yahoo News does NOT offer RSS feeds by category. But I want to get notified of changes. So, I fire up “technology that may or may not exist” and simply draw a box around the content I am interested in:

 

And a popup would appear. I can then set how I want to be notified of changes (email, RSS, etc) and the frequency I want said technology to check to see if changes have been made.

I love this idea, as there are still many pages that do not offer RSS feeds, but have content that changes frequently.

A could of additional ideas:

1) Info categorizing

Like the example above, once I highlight the text I’m interested in, I could then format the text into db fields in the popup interface. So it would be something like:

2) Uh-oh Notification

If this technology used simple scraping by defining code context, there’s one big drawback: what if the site changes their layout? What if the code changes? Well, in that case, it would be cool to let the technology give me a notification email telling me to go back to the site and redefine the region I’m interested in, while keeping all of the category info intact.

 

So, does this exist?

Thanks!!!!!

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3 Responses to “RSS/Content Syndication From Sites Without Feeds- Does This Exist? Please Let Me Know”

  1. Nathan Gilliatt, on September 4th, 2008 at 9:56 pm Said:

    Try Dapper ( http://www.dapper.net/ ). I think it does what you’re looking for.

  2. Nathan Burke, on September 5th, 2008 at 6:47 pm Said:

    Thanks, Nathan. That’s exactly what I was looking for!

  3. Todd Van Hoosear, on September 30th, 2008 at 6:51 pm Said:

    Dear Nathan and Nathan,

    Dapper is EXACTLY what we as a PR agency were looking for! We have tons of clients who want to add RSS feeds for their news releases and other content, but who don’t have any kind of CMS for their press releases.

    Our stopgap solution was to create a “dummy” blog for them, then paste in the press releases as blog posts, thus creating a nice RSS feed–but a feed that returns people to the blog site, not the website’s press room.

    Until the wire services get their act together and offer their clients their own RSS feeds (great way to reduce churn, eh?), we’ll use this tool. It scrapes the sites pretty nicely. Haven’t tested it with substantial updates yet, but hopefully it doesn’t break!

    Thanks, guys! You just made my rationalization for all the time I spend in Google Reader MUCH, much easier… :-)

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