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.