Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

Thomas Baekdal’s idea for a bridge between Web pages and RSS feeds is a simple and good one:

WEB2RSS is a simple web application that can convert almost any normal website/page into an RSS feed.

Thus, if a site you want to watch doesn’t emit RSS (and many don’t), you should instead instead tell your RSS reader to watch Web2rss, such that whenever your aggregator fetches from Web2rss the service tells notifies you of changes to the web page.

Here’s such a feed: http://www.baekdal.com/web2rss/rss.asp?url=http%3A//www.suchwerk.net/sodcms_news_en.htm&m=&ex=&img=0&out=rss ; this is for s3drive’s announcement page.

At first GreatNews failed to load the RSS feed and FeedValidator failed to validate it. Subscribing via IE7 RSS reader and copying the feed url worked. I didn’t look to see why.

Next time I need to use it I’ll investigate further.

Monitoring webpages is such a common need I’m surprised RSS readers don’t have this functionality built in. If lots of people use Thomas’ service it could quickly become an unmanageable load. Thomas could monetize with ads, I suppose, but then I’d seek an alternative!

Update: I’ve posted at http://www.curiostudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8290#8290 a link to here. GreatNews would be greater if it could monitor web pages as well as RSS: it could easily cache the last copy it saw and present the differences as a RSS change.

Technorati : web2rss

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 26th, 2006 at 12:03 pm and is filed under GreatNews, Blogging, Amazon S3, 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.