Hi, I'd be grateful if anyone could help me figure this out please... I'm a local news reporter and I'm trying to figure out how I can use an RSS feeder with sites that do not offer an RSS service. I've been using Google Reader and I've come across sites such as feedity.com that appear to enable this. However, when I type in an address of a site that doesn't offer RSS it then takes me to a section where you can narrow the search by site area. What I'm really looking to do is set it up by keywords, namely the place names of the area where I work. I only want to get updates if something is added to a site that refers to my patch. I work on a mac at home and PC at work and want to access my reader from both, so presumably a web-based reader would be best, if I do need to switch from Google Reader. Any suggestions would be much appreciated! Thanks
If the site is not providing a feed you need a scraper to get their data. Then you need some sort of code analysis to check it for changes and determine whether it's new or not. Then if it the page has new content you need to analyze the text for references to the keywords you select. Then if the page has new content and it references your selected keywords it needs to save that data and notify you, or just email you the data directly. This is not minor. I could get you something basic running for a few hundred bucks that would work with most sites on the web. Being as you're at DP you might be able to get something hacked together pretty cheap, but you also need to run a webserver to manage the service, or set up some always-connected computer with PHP and MySQL and Apache, etc... You are, however, definitely looking for a custom app. The closest thing I've found on the web is that you might be able to find a site-checker service that would notify you of changes to other people's sites as well as your own. If you didn't want to read every change, though, you would still have to have someplace to store the data while your application analyzed it looking for relevance to your keywords. any less confiused? lol
Hi Thanks for replying. I'm afraid I'm not very high-tec and I'm hopelessly confused by all of this! And I'm not paid enough in journalism to fork out any dosh! I was hoping there was something free and simple to set up that could help me with my needs, but it sounds like there isn't!