Ever found a really interesting website and wanted stay upto date with the latest information? An RSS feed is perfect solution for this ~ but what if the website doesn’t have one?
Building my resources for 8109 I had exactly this issue. I use RSS so I can quickly, selectively view articles that might be of interest without loading up lots of different websites.
To things I didn’t know last week which has helped get around this problem:
- Website built using MediaWiki has rss feeds
- Websites with an email newsletter can be turned into am rss feed.
1. MediaWiki feeds
A example: Ascilite uses MediaWiki for their principle website. Can’t see the RSS icon? Deep in MediaWiki documentation it tells me to modilfy the web address:From: http://www.ascilite.org.au/index.php/Main_Page
To: http://www.ascilite.org.au/index.php?title=Special:Newpages&feed=rssPop that into my RSS reader & presto! An RSS feed from ASCILITE showing me the newly created pages!
2. Convert Emails into an RSS feed
Ok - so I have your favourite website, it has no RSS feed. It’s not MediaWiki. But it does have a email newsletter. Not being a fan of using NewsGroups and Email for news servicesm, what I really wanted is something that turns an email into an RSS feed.
To the rescue comes:
- MailBucket [http://www.mailbucket.org/] a free service at the moment.
- Edna Lists which uses Lyris version 8.0 or later.
I didn’t check out MailBucket but I’m sure it does a great job.
As an experiment Kerrie Smith & I set up a new edna Edna Lists. Basically we’re building this RSS feed direct from Edna Lists / Lyris :
It gets a bit tricky but it’s worth it:
- Create a new list with yourself as the owner.
- Make the archive publicly available
- Put the list into moderation. [This allows me to check the first emailed Newsletter for setting up a new user]
- I then subscribed to a number of education ICT website’s Newsletter using the list name.
- With each unqiue email received I then set up a new member with the following settings:
- Bypassing moderation - the email just passes to the feed.
- membership kind: “no mail” is important to switch off any emails back to website newsletter :)
- Turn off any notifications and copies.
Ok - now to the feed: Basically it’s a hack of the list’s web address:
- http://apps-4.edna.edu.au/read/rss?forum=tom_c&rev=0.92
Where
- http://apps-4.edna.edu.au/ <- is the web address of for edna lists
- read/rss? <- is the command to lists to produce a RSS feed
- forum=tom_c <- the list to make a feed from
- &rev=0.92 <- the type of RSS feed,
Check it out:
You can do more with this such as non-public archives but that’s another day.
whoot!
3 Comments
A little hack to for GMAIL RSS feeds (inbox or per label):
http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/qt/et081005.htm
Fang
Shiny!
That’s nice - but not something people should be relying on!
The problem there is that apps-4 isn’t the public name for the lists application. It’ll work, but if we move lists (which we’ve done in the past) all the feeds will break - they should be referring to lists.edna.edu.au/etc
Unfortunately that doesn’t work ATM - I think we need to look at the rewrite rules.
Post a Comment