I stumbled upon Paul Gallagher’s blog from the OTN TechBlog. Paul created a Perl script that scrapes the HTML of an Oracle forum user profile web page and generates an RSS feed from that user’s most recent posts.

When I saw “HTML scraping” I immediately thought of Dapper. I have used Dapper before to generate a feed for only new questions posted on AskTom.

It took me just 5 minutes to create a new Dapper application that takes an Oracle forum user ID as an input and generates an RSS feed for the most recent posts from that user as output, without writing a single line of code (I’m lazy). You can get the user id from the user’s profile page. For example here is the feed for user ID 66 (Justin Cave):

http://www.dapper.net/transform.php?dappName=OraForumsByAuthor&transformer=RSS…variableArg_0=66

Just change 66 to the user ID of your choice to generate a feed for this user.

In addition to RSS, Dapper allows you to transform the data to other formats such as XML, Google Gadgets, Netvibes Modules, PageFlake, Google Maps, Email, CSV, JSON… But most interesting is a Flash widget that you can create and put on your blog or website:

Add to your site   powered by Dapper

Cool! Check out the OraForumsByAuthor dapper homepage.

---

Possibly related:

• OraNA.info Now With Categories and More Feeds
• Click Me Please
• Oracle Blogs and Blog Posts Ranked
• Find Out If Your Blog Is Usable, Accessible or Simply Good
• FeedBurner - Bloglines Problems

---

Tagged dapper | Post a Comment