Oh Whip me baby! Feed me; Feedwhip RSS for any web page

Simon Willison linked to Feedwhip. I love this idea. It’s very much like a Mac OSX App I’d been using, Changes Meter. The basic idea is that it provides an RSS feed to changes that happen on a web page that doesn’t have a feed. I use my feed reader a lot for all sorts of things. Changes Meter was an OK stop gap, but it’s nice to be able to monitor things with my feed reader again.

There are a couple of caveats, though. I wonder how well it works with pages that have dynamic elements like Ad beacons which are randomly changed. That could easily pollute a feed to the point of uselessness. Feedwhip is also pretty limited with the amount of feeds and the refreshes frequency. A standard user gets 5 feeds which are refreshed every 48 hours. Right now they are giving a free 180 day upgrade to the Pro version which gives 10 feeds refreshed daily. Still not too awesome.

Netnewswire has an option to subscribe to so called special feeds. These can be a few of things, but particularly a script or a flat file. While you could make cron job to do diff curls against each other and publish the results, I like the idea of a live script better. Being able to cook up scripts which muck about with feeds is another reason why I like local feed readers over web based ones.

Technical limitations aside, what I liked best about Feedwhip was the idea of getting a feed for information from anywhere. I’d like to see something which takes this further and produces a usable interface to page scrape directly into a feed. Something like that which could be thrown at Pipes would be incredible. A user could create a feed of any information they wanted without any coding at all and subscribe to it with any feed reader at all.

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feedwhip, changesmeter, simonwillison, netnewswire, feeds, rss, atom