dizzysoft software

Thanks to RSS you can save money by finding the cheapest gas in your area.

You’ll have to visit FuelMeUp.com to get a list of gas prices. Notice that the gas stations are listed neatly in a consistently formatted table. Since the content we are interested in is formatted so cleanly, we can use one of the many web to RSS sites to scrape the data and convert it into an RSS feed. There is a lot of extraneous information on this page, that we aren’t interested in for this purpose, but if we click “Show All Stations” at the bottom of the page, we will only get the information we want.

In the past I’ve used page2rss to convert web pages to RSS feeds. I really pleased with how quickly this site updates me with a change to a page. If we use the “Show All Stations” page and give it to page2rss, we will be notified any time something changes here- even if its some of the information we are not interested in (such as formatting). Here’s an example of this feed for my zip code in Lake Wylie, SC.

If we want to be a little more specific we can turn to RSSxl. There we can enter the “Show All Stations” address and (after viewing the source code from the page) give a beginning and ending string for each item in the feed. In this case I used <tr (notice the missing >) for the beginning of the item and </tr> for the end. This produces a feed with the store’s name, address, and current price, as well as the date. On top of that we have a few extra characters (“Update Gas Prices”) left over from the page, where you might tell the site the latest info. Here’s the feed this site creates for my home in Lake Wylie, SC.

If we turn to Feed43 we can cut out the rest of this extraneous information. With a little knowledge of HTML, and a few minutes to follow their tutorial, we can get only the information we are interested in and convert it into an RSS feed. We can also give the feed a unique title (besides the name of the web page that the other sites automatically sets). The best part of this is that Feed43 gives you a link to edit this feed later- something none of the other web page to RSS feed conversion sites offer. This makes it easy to “fix” a feed when the site changes formatting. Here’s the feed for my hometown.

Once we have a feed we can decide how we want to retrieve it. I have a copy of the feed in my blog reader, to check at from home. I also have a copy of this feed sent to my cell phone by SMS- so I can stay up to date while on the road.

After writing this post I realized that this was still generating too much information. What I really want to know is, “who has the cheapest gas in town?” and not, “what is every gas station charging for gas?” With a little tweaking, I changed the Feed43 feed to only produce one station- the top station listed, which will always be the cheapest Gas station. Now I can compare other stations with the cheapest gas and decide if it is worth traveling to the cheapest station.

When I use this feed, and keep track of my deductible miles with Mileage on my Palm handheld I save even more money!