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January 17th, 2007 | Posted in Web 2.0 5 Comments »
Ponyfish allows you to create an RSS feed for sites that don’t have them. If your favorite site is constantly maintained and updated, and there’s no feed for it, just enter the URL into Ponyfish, configure it a little by clicking your mouse on the site’s links, and Ponyfish will create a feed for you.
It’s a little hard to believe that it actually works, but apparently there is quite a buzz about it. The user interface is fairly simple. You just click all the links on the page, and Ponyfish begins tracking changes to the content from those paths.
For example, the Orlando STC site is one that I wish had an RSS feed. Their site is really informative, but it lacks the RSS feed. How do I know when information has been added or updated? Does someone have to send me an e-mail, cluttering up my inbox?
Hence the concept of the feed. Let me know if you’ve used Ponyfish with success.
I just heard about another way to get RSS feeds from a site that does not have a feed set up.
http://www.wotzwot.com/
Perhaps you can try it out with the Orlando site?
Actually, I tried Ponyfish with the Orlando site, but it didn’t work very well. I got new posts of everything, from images to PDF files to things that had no content.
Re the wotzwot, it looks like a decent RSS feed generator, but you know, it’s pretty simple to create an RSS feed by hand. There are only about four different tags. If I had a traditional website, I would probably hand code it or use a generator to create the initial file, and then update it by hand. Fortunately, everything I use has a feed.
For handcoding, you can use this script from FeedForAll: http://www.feedforall.com/free-php-script.htm
I have heard that it is the Rolls Royce for this type of stuff. What I don’t know is – what do you do with a site that is .asp or .html, that is, NOT .php.
If you had to create such a script for every single entry, I think you would lose interest very quickly! Thank you , Smart People at WordPress for have this type of feature incorporated nicely into WordPress.
Looking under the hood of my WordPress, the principle of adding a feed looks easy. There is a ~rss.php file in the core, or common, files area for WP files. That is a relatively tiny file with the XML tags that pick up the content that gets displayed in someone’s reader. You just have to learn the different display possibilities – a teaser text, the first X number of lines, the entire entry, and so on – and then you can tweak the code accordingly. At least, that is what it looks like to me after a 2-second glance.
I know there are a lot of plugins that allow you to tweak your feed. The most impressive is one called Category Visibility, http://ryowebsite.com/?p=46. You can exclude categories from your feed, home page, from searches, and more.
What I have not been able to figure out is how to exclude a category feed from my overall site feed, but still allow users to subscribe to that category feed separately. With Category Visibility, once I exclude a category feed, it’s excluded permanently — no one can subscribe to it separately. I was attempting this because I wanted to add a blog feed to my podcast, but not have my blog included in my podcast feed. Had I set the site up this way, it would have been easy to do. But adding it in later has so far outwitted me.
Re looking under the hood, this is one of my favorite things about wordpress — you can look under the hood and tinker with it. It really allows that. Blogger, on the other hand, groups all template files into the same file, and makes it much harder.
I use http://www.feedity.com which is also a good tool