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Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko —  — Web — rss-feeds, scrape

Pattern-based RSS feeds from pages with Feed43

feed43_icon I’ve previously covered Page2RSS service that turns changes on web page into RSS feed. It’s simple to use but not very precise. More complex and sophisticated service would be Feed43.

What it does

Feed43 serves same purpose – providing RSS feed for sites without one . However instead of using internal algorithms to detect changes it offers pattern-based recognition to form RSS items from specific parts of page. User has to form pattern manually.

It’s kinda hard to explain and pattern engine is proprietary (why not use popular and standard regexp ?). Luckily there is pretty good and visual documentation .

One of the features I like most that feed is formed in real time . There is no caching or update interval – when you pull feed it contains exactly what site has at moment.

Limitations

There are some limitations for free accounts :

  • updating no more often than every 6 hours (blog actually says it takes 96 requests in 24 hours to get temporarily banned);
  • max 100Kb source page size;
  • max 20 items in feed.

There is also pretty annoying server time limit – if your pattern takes too long to process (over few seconds) it will be discarder and you get message that you have to optimize it.

Overall

Service is powerful and very precise but limitations make it unusable on heavy pages or where complex patterns are needed. Still it provides level of control over feed forming few alternatives can match.

Home page http://feed43.com/

Blog http://feed43.blogspot.com/

RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Feed43

Twitter http://twitter.com/feed43

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3 Comments

  • Lyndi #

    This is quite a mouthful. I will have to go investigate. Who said blogging was boring, there is always something new to master. Thanks for the links.

  • Rarst #

    @Lyndi There is always app or service readers hadn't used yet. At least some of them. :) Feed43 is not exactly user friendly (especially comparing to Page2RSS) but is way more powerful. I think I use them in 4:1 proportion with Page2RSS for most (easy stuff) and Feed43 for precise feeds (scraping tag-based pages, searches and such).

  • FilterMyRSS.com – light online filter for feeds | Rarst.net #

    [...] had featured more than once (ok, twice – Feed43 and Page2RSS) tools I use to keep up with pages that don’t provide RSS feed. But I accumulated [...]