Runningwithbulls:RSSifying

From RWBWiki

RSS Feeds are becoming more and more widely used on the Internet, allowing people to keep up-to-date with changes on sites, with new information, and a ton of other things.

Feed43 allows you to create RSS feeds for sites that do not support RSS natively, or do not publish public RSS feeds. Feed43 acts as a "proxy" for RSS feed aggregators when in contact with websites, allowing you to monitor any website from the aggregator.

From Feed43's site:


Can I use created feeds to syndicate (publish automatically) information on my web site?

  • Technically, yes. But there are serious legal implications, since most content authors restrict re-publishing content without prior permission.
  • You can, however, put a link to the feed on your web site. This will violate no copyrights.

One nice thing about Feed43 is that it is news agregator, desktop application independent. You can create the feed, as if the site created it itself. if you move application, browser, OS platform, it doesn't matter.


Technical info:

How often does Feed43 pulls data from the sourcesite?

  • Sourcesite is pulled at the time you request your feed from within news reader, but not more often than every 6 hours.
  • You are strongly recommended to obey this polling interval, otherwise your IP may be blocked."

-- For the site whose content you are RSS'ifying, this is also a good thing. Otherwise, its possible to have a large number of RSS feeds polling the original site. This can have a number of effects, one being the original site blocking Feed43, thus cutting off the possibility of RSS'ifying the site.

What are the restrictions of your free service?

  • 6-hour polling interval
  • A maximum of 20 news items per channel
  • Source page should not exceed 100KB (only first 100KB will be downloaded and parsed)


- The 20 news items per channel can be a problem, if you are RSS'ifying a search result. But, if the information is chronologically ordered, then it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

- Again the max. source page size can be an issue when parsing a search result.

So far I have managed to get feeds out of IrishJobs.ie job searches[1], RTE Aertel listings for RTE1 and Network2

--admin 12:54, 17 March 2006 (GMT)

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