The Easy Way to Generate an RSS Feed from Your Forum Posts
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:
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Cool! Check out the OraForumsByAuthor dapper homepage.
3 Comments | Filed in Oracle | Tags: dapperExtract And Use Information From Any Website Without Any Programming
That’s what Dapper allows you to do. It allows you to build web applications and mashups using data from any website on the Internet.
For example, AskTom has three RSS feeds available: just updated, hot articles and most popular. The just updated feed includes updates to new and old questions. It would have been nice if there was a feed for new questions only, in other words, a feed that gets updated only when a new question (and Tom’s answer) is posted on the website.
Using Dapper, I was able to create such a feed. Drum roll please…… introducing the “AskTom – by first asked” RSS feed. And here is the “AskTom – by first asked” Dapp.
I had fun playing with Dapper. Although there are other services, like Feed43 and Ponyfish, that allow you to create your own RSS feeds from almost any web page, unlike others, in addition to RSS, Dapper can also output XML, HTML, CSV, JSON, Google gadgets, Netvibes modules and more.
1 Comment | Filed in Oracle, Tips | Tags: asktom, dapper, feedWhy I Switched to a Full-Text Feed
After reading “Why I’ m asking for full-text RSS feeds” by Constantin Basturea, and “Only Generous Bloggers Influence” by Steve Rubel, I have decided to publish my blog’s feed as a full text instead of just a summary.
As a blogger, why wouldn’t you publish a full-text feed? I can think of the following reasons:
- Increase page views on your blog by forcing your readers to click on yet another link to read your post.
- Increase advertisement click through on your blog (if you monetize your blog using Google AdSense for example).
- Have more accurate information about your blog’s readership.
- Protect your content from plagiarism.
I switched to a full-text feed because:
- I want my content to be easily accessible and read by as many people as possible with minimum number of clicks and on maximum number of devices, like PDAs and cell phones.
- Even though I have Google AdSense on my blog, most, if not all, of the click through is generated by people landing on my blog via search engines.
- Thanks to Feedburner, I know how many feed subscribers I have. In fact, I show the number of subscribers on the sidebar of my blog.
- Publishing a summary or a full-text feed has very little to do with plagiarism. With web scraping and online services like Dapper (which is really cool by the way), your content can be plagiarized whether it is on your blog’s HTML web page or in your feed’s XML content. Moreover, using Feedburner, I can add a copyright notice and a creative commons license to the feed.
So, fellow bloggers, why don’t you unleash your full-text feeds?
2 Comments | Filed in Interesting Stuff, WordPress | Tags: blog, dapper, feed
