Put someone else’s information on your website with RSS

Start by scraping information from a website into an RSS feed by using the RSS Generator. This site goes to a given web page and searches for a part of that web page using a regular expression. Using this site defeats my goal of giving examples of how to do things with existing RSS services that involve no programming because it uses the difficult concept of regular expressions- you can tell how difficult this is by the fact that this site’s own example doesn’t work. You might find sites like regular-expressions.info useful as you figure this one out. This is, of course, after you view the page in HTML in order to learn what you are searching for.

Using this service I created a feed that keeps track of the current NCAA Basketball polls. I did this by giving the RSS Generator the Yahoo! Sports page for rankings and told it to use all circumstances of table rows (since the lists are formatted in tables).

Next give the RSS feed to one of the many services that create an embeddable object for your website. There are many available, but many of them did not like the feed created by the RSS Generator. This is why I went to a couple validation services and see if anything might be wrong. The Feed Validator says that, “This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations…” Apparently some of the services I was working could not overcome this issue.

The best site I could find to produce an object that I could embed on a web page is the FeedJumbler. It not only converts the feed into different formats, but produces HTML versions of the feed and a JavaScript function you can add in your webpage codes. Since this data can change, it is probably best to insert the JavaScript function on your webpage (just copy and paste it where you want it) and you will always have the latest information on your website.

Please give credit where credit is due. Be sure to tell people where you got the information you post, and give credit to the tools you used to post it on your site.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Put someone else’s information on your website with RSS”

  1. the zim Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 5:00 pm

    If you can’t get the regular expression thing to work for you, you might try another site (http://www.wotzwot.com/rssxl.php). Although you will probably still have to view the site in HTML in order to determine how each element is separated through a little trial-and-error it is sure easier to use.

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