I Want My RSS
Posted by Bill Rini @ 6:31 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
If you’ve been with me a while you’ll note that I wrote an Email to RSS gateway some time ago. It was pretty much a simple little tool in PHP that I set up on a cron job to poll a POP3 server at a regular interval and grab emails sent to a specific account. Then it simply parsed the emails and reformatted them into RSS friendly markup. Well, I say “simply parsed the emails” but it was somewhat a pain in the butt as different mail readers handle encoding, format, and other issues differently and each time I thought I had it nailed I would uncover yet another new way some email client author decided ot handle the problem. I may yet release the source code for that if I can ever find the time to clean up the code to a point where I don’t have to hang my head in shame by having my name associated with it but what I really wanted to talk about is my frustration that some of my favorite sites don’t have RSS feeds. It was that frustration that drove me to write the Email to RSS gateway in the first place. I was able to solve the problem with mailing lists and newsletters but I still haven’t cracked the information I would most like to get into RSS format which is message board postings.
Perhaps I’ve become spoiled with my RSS reader. I go to one place and I get 99.999% of the news and information that I need. I probably have 60 or 70 feeds going in my RSS reader and I can say with some certainty that I would never visit that many sites in a single day if it weren’t for RSS. I can scan 600 - 700 items in a half hour or 45 minutes each morning or in the evening when I get home from work and I’m caught up on the days events. I get feeds from my favorite blogs, news from foreign news sources, technical articles, project management pieces, political commentary, and a smattering of random information or writings that just happened to tickle my fancy at one point or another. But what about message boards? I can’t hang out every day on every message board but I would love to catch the general discussions so I can peek in when I see something that interests me.
Two of the message boards I would most like to see in RSS are:
2+2 Poker Message Board
ScubaDiving.com Message Board
There are others but those are the two I find myself kicking myself every week because I want to read them but I never get around to it. In fact I would probably be a regular contributor but I simply can’t keep up if I only have time to check once a week or so.
Anybody have any ideas on tools that can parse different message boards? Even if I could find something that just scraped the major boards (vBulletin, phpBB, UBB, etc.) I would be a happy camper. I have a feeling I may just end up having to hack out a spider to do this.
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
iggy added these pithy words on May 07 04 at 7:05 pmwhat if i repurpose your content in a banner ad, poker shill site?
would you care?
just curious.
Bill Rini added these pithy words on May 08 04 at 5:25 amIggy,
I’m not sure I fully understand the question. I’m not asking to display their content here. I want to be able to read their feeds in an RSS news reader so that I can quickly scan headlines from multiple sources in one program. So to answer your question . . . as long as it was for personal use, I wouldn’t have a problem with you (or anyone else) displaying my content in a poker shill site. I don’t think there are any free email accounts that offer free email addresses but if I was sending out a newsletter and you viewed it in the poker world’s version of Hotmail which displayed poker ads on the same page as my newsletter . . . then that’s personal use and I have no issue. On the other hand, if you’re asking if you can come to this site and cut-n-past my articles and put them up on your site then that’s not personal use.
I don’t think there’s a lot of fuzzy area here. The courts have been pretty good at drawing those lines and I think if your use of my content constituted personal use . . . I have no problem. Besides, like I said, I want the RSS feeds not to display on this site but so I can quickly browse their content and then click thru to their site to read the full page (not just the abstract in most RSS feeds) and to engage in discussion/conversation. If anything, they’ll see more traffic from me, not less.
To be quite honest, I wouldn’t visit your site, Chris H’s, H Double’s or a whole list of others on a daily basis. The content is updated infrequently and . . . sometimes the postings don’t interest me. On the other hand, I do have all of those sites in my RSS reader and I quickly scan the headlines each day and pick and choose which postings I have an interest in. I just think it’s easier that way.
But then again, I’m not 100% sure that’s the point you were getting at so I’ll leave it at that unless you wanted to clarify
Bill
neurophyre added these pithy words on May 05 05 at 7:04 pmI am interested in your script. Please contact me if you happen to see this.
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