I am a huge fan of RSS.I am currently using Feedly as my default RSS Reader.I have a question though that I am unable to find the answer.How can I follow a website that does not provide RSS Feeds?I have tried several addons on firefox or extensions on chrome that automatically detect RSS when I am visiting a website,therefore with one-click I can add that website on Feedly.In addition I have searched through the internet to create manually an RSS Feed,when a website does not provide one,but it seems there is not a free way to do it,or if I try an online 'RSS Creator' (like page2rss and more) most of the times they are not working (either can't find the RSS of a website or create an invalid RSS).However,I didn't give up,so I was desperately seeking a way,to find the RSS Feed via the 'source code' of a website.Unfortunately,that only works for Youtube Channels and not for other websites.Is there a way via those actions to 'follow' another website?
I have found a way to 'detect changes' of Feed-less websites using update-scanner addon on firefox and page monitor on chrome.But,all I want to do is put those webpages in one app/website (like Feedly) so that I can follow them whether I am using my pc,or iphone/ipad (iOS),or tablet (android),or another user's pc/laptop.Any suggestions?Keep in mind that iOS devices don't support extensions.If I confused you,visit this link and you'll understand exactly what I am looking for.
http://googlereader.blogspot.gr/2010/01/follow-changes-to-any-website.html
The only drawback is that googleReader does not exist anymore!Do you know another RSS Reader that support this feature (like Feedly,the Old Reader etc) ?
Thanks!
A simple but basic solution is Page2Rss.com. You put the URL of the page. One's a day, the service crawl the page and generate an item for all what's new.
Feed43.com does a much better job, even its free version. You have to elaborate rules of extraction from the HTML code.
Feedity is much (much) more interactive, bit commercial.
we have an author that wants to be able to easily bookmark various articles and have them appear in a wordpress backed site. Over the years we have been using a cobbled together approach where we use the delicious toolbar and it feeds to a google reader. They bookmarked using these tools and we used wordpress to consume the rss feeds they produced. Now google has removed this feature.
Im hesitant to add yet another bookmarking/rss service out there for fear that I will be back to this problem in 6 months. I was thinking of writing or finding a simple firefox addon that would just create a link or blog post based on the url (and possible scan the html or css). It seems like this is a common problem, any other ideas or suggestions on how to solve this? I proposed just having our author use wordpress admin to add links, but that was too cumbersome.
Have you tried the "Press This" bookmarklet that comes with WordPress? It's on the Settings → Writing menu. Just drag it up to the bookmark toolbar in your browser.
What is the web technology behind displaying live feeds like twitter search results and dailybooth live feed? Can I get similar results from any RSS with some coding?
The main technology behind such websites often is Ajax. This is used to dynamically change the webpages instead of reloading the whole page.
Yes, you can! You will probably need a realtime (PubSubHubbub-enabled feed) to achieve this, and plug it into some kind of websocket/comet/ajax/longpolling client... but that should work easily. Check this, for example. It's the firehose of gowalla checkins posted to a google map. All the code is on github, so it's quite easy to build, play with!
On a Wordpress site, I have both a normal blog that I want Google to detect and an RSS feed for outgoing links to other sites. I don't need/want bots to get at this other RSS feed nor do I want people to be able to get the link for their own use.
I've disabled RSS for the main blog successfully but am not sure how to encrypt/protect/hide the RSS link for this additional feed.
I'm not sure how Facebook runs a newsfeed without RSS but however they do it is probably beyond my means/experience to replicate.
Where these are just outgoing links, I don't think copyright notices in the feed will do much. Maybe there is a way to output the links automatically through a means other than RSS?
Use Robots.Text www.robotstxt.org to prevent google from following the link. All self respecting robots should follow the directives in the robots.txt file. This file needs to go in the root of your sit.
The basic answer to this is to use a method of getting the feed entries in a manner other than using the actual RSS like outputting JSON, going through the API, etc.
It will help prevent scraping though not completely.
For all the RSS feeds I subscribe to I use Google Reader, which I love. I do however have a couple of specific RSS feeds that I'd like to be notified of as soon as they get updated (say, for example, an RSS feed for a forum I like to monitor and respond to as quickly as possible).
Are there any tools out there for this kind of monitoring which also have some kind of alert functionality (for example, a prompt window)?
I've tried Simbolic RSS Alert but I found it a bit buggy and couldn't get it to alert me as often as I liked.
Suggestions? Or perhaps a different experience with Simbolic?
If you have access to Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Thunderbird, these email clients allow you to add RSS feeds in the same way you would add an email account.
I use Google Reader generally but when I want to keep up-to-date with something specific, I add the RSS feed to Outlook and it arrives in my inbox as if it was an email.
RSS isn't "push", which means that you need to have something that polls the website. It's much less traffic than getting the whole site or front page (for instance, you can say "Give me all articles newer than the last time I asked"), but it's traffic nonetheless.
It's generally understood you shouldn't have a refresh of more than 30 minutes in an automated client. (Citation required).
Having said that, you may find a client which allows you to set a more frequent refresh.
RSS2mail is a simple python script which I used extensively a few years back.
As Matthew stated you really shouldn't bother an RSS feed more than the producer allows but you can use http headers to check for changes in a very light way which is something rss2email does quite well.
You could always knock something up yourself... I've done it in the past and it really isn't too difficult a job to write an RSS parser.
Of course, as others have mentioned, there's an etiquette question as to how much of the website's valuable bandwidth you want to hog for yourself in RSS request traffic. That's a matter for your own conscience. ;)
Reading all the answers reminded me that I actually never looked into solving this using a Firefox add-on. I soon found Update Scanner and I think it look really promising!
I like an old version of feedreader for that kind of use, where the icon in the system tray started spinning when new stuff came in (the new version goes from grey to yellow instead).
it's also possible to be alerted for each new message.
I've used Pingie to send me an SMS when a new item appears in an RSS feed. Perhaps, it will be useful for you, if you have a cellphone text messaging plan.
I use RSS Bandit (for Windows) to stay up to date with my RSS feeds/blogs.
There are lots of other RSS aggregator applications though.
If you don't want another "big" application but have Windows Vista, you can also choose to make Internet Explorer monitor the RSS feed and use the Feed sidebar application (called "Feedschlagzeilen in German version, not sure about the English one) that comes with Vista to show the latest headlines.
Since you mentioned a pop-up, I'll add Feed Notifier to the list. It sits in the Windows Tray (or whatever they call it now in Windows 7) and pops up a notification when there are new entries to your feeds. You can set it up with multiple feeds, each with its own polling interval. When there are new entries, it pops up a prompt which you can dismiss or click to go to the entry. You are able to go back and review recent entries later, even if you clicked to dismiss them the first time. If your PC is asleep when a new entry is added, you will be notified the next time you wake it up.