Friday, January 26, 2007

Feedscrapers and other ways to "re-use" content

Our hospital has a very good website on the internet, but does not offer RSSfeeds (yet). By using a Feedscraper like Feedity I created rssfeeds of the news webpages, the Promotions (doctoral degree), Agenda and Press Releases, that are now available via the QuickSearch LIrbary Toolbar, and visible on my blog in the sidebar. "Feedscrapers" are tools that can make an RSSfeed of (almost) any webpage. This can be usefull if the website has no rssfeeds available or is (not yet) configured to deal with RSS.Please let me know if there are more that are : free and web-based. (I should have searched for "scraper" in the CSE BiomedicallibrarianBlogSearch first: David mentioned rss-specifications.com, the RSS-display page !) Converters/scripts
  • Alert service for your subject searches via RSS (PubMed offers this, but also for Google searches you can use Ben HammersleyƂ’s Google-to-RSS SOAP script or the GooRSS service.
  • News Feeds To Mobile Phone PhoneFeeds.com and Litefeeds.com you can convert any RSS-feed in a feed for your mobile, Palm, Blackberry, PDA or MDA.

1 comment:

stefanandr said...

You are missing one feedscraper, www.openkapow.com It requires a download, but its visual scripting environment gives you full control of everything, as well as combining information from say a list and its sub pages into one feed. You can also make feeds with filters, for example combine several feeds into one feed, but only include those with a certain test in them. There is a cool digg feed example on the site http://openkapow.com/blogs/demos/