Re: [syndication] General purpose scrapers and bandwidth

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

Dave Winer <dave@userland.com> wrote:
> Have you got docs for the algorithm, for people who make tools you're sorry
> you can't mention?? ;->

It's the same one Aaron came up with originally.

# Put <span class="rss:item"> ... </span> round each item in your page.
In Blogger you'd do this by going to your template in blogger and 
changing
<$BlogItemBody$>
to
<span class="rss:item"><$BlogItemBody$></span>
And then publish something to re-create the page with the new template
# Then put the URL of your new and modified page into the form below.
# Check that what you get back looks like RSS.
# Now you can make a link to this file like
"http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php?url=your_web_page_url";

To be honest I hate this. It got done originally because I thought Aaron 
should have an alternative and I worked in PHP instead of Perl. Like I 
said it's a horrible hack that was needed because Blogger and Blogspot 
couldn't do RSS. We should be over that now.

So now the next one is Google. Google news search output really ought to 
be available as RSS. So in the mean time there's gnews2rss. Hopefully 
that will become redundant as well.

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