My RSS experiments (Austin Chronicle & Orange Whoopass)

November 11th, 2005

Skip the article and click here for the Austin Chronicle feeds.

I’ve taken an active interest in RSS. I’ve used it to revamp my (other) home page from a 3-link dud into a dynamic portal of my online world. I use an RSS client on my Mac to follow dozens of site feeds (Bill Simmons articles, Astros.com news, the usual blogs, etc). It’s been an invaluable way to follow my interests or publish information online, since it’s less time spent reloading bookmarks or updating HTML. RSS does the work for me.

I wish every content-driven site on the Internet had an RSS feed. That’s starting to be the case, but not yet. Two of my favorite sites, for example, do not use RSS to publish their content: the Austin Chronicle and Orange Whoopass (an Astros fan site). Within each site, there are particular sections I check daily.

Hooey to that. I want RSS feeds for them dammit.

After spending some time online searching out tutorials on how I’d go about doing this, eventually I came across a concept called screen scraping. Seems pretty simple, so I spent a little bit of time trying to put feeds together for each of the aforementioned sections.

Lo and behold, it worked! Here they are in their infantile glory…for music and Astros lovers alike.

Austin Chronicle

Orange Whoopass

  • News You Can Use – Astros news as collected by Richard Pravata, OWA’s resident LexisNexis junkie.
  • The TalkZone – new posts from the legendary BBS for Astros fans. Bring it strong, or don’t bring it at all.

(all feeds are in RSS 2.0 format)

I call it an experiment because I really don’t know what’s going to happen. Scraping these sites from my own website, then listing it with FeedBurner. I don’t know if or how Feedburner handles caching. I don’t know if these sites will see a traffic spike, or even if my own site’s bandwidth will go belly up. I didn’t really think that far ahead to be honest. I really just wanted to find out what would happen.

But we shall see.

[UPDATE] Please leave comments below if you have problems with the feed. Thanks.

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2 Comments

  • 1. mrc  |  December 16th, 2005 at 5:05 pm

    thanks, man. the AC club listings. good stuff.

  • 2. ruben  |  December 18th, 2005 at 8:54 am

    No problem. You might also want to check out some other feeds at the new site I built:

    The ATX

About

I'm Ruben Miranda. I'm an MBA student graduate and financial services advisor living in Austin, Texas. This is my blog, home to some random takes on finance, business, software, and occasionally pop culture. Thanks for stopping by. (By the way, I don't speak for my employer.)

rem@alum.mit.edu

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