ryan kennedy’s blog

I totally forget who to thank for pointing this out. I caught it in one of my feeds, but it was a couple of days ago. Anyway, I finally got my invite code to use Feed43 (Feed For Free). It’s awesome. I will say that it’s probably not for novice users. The interface requires you to know HTML and a bit about pattern matching. So it’s unlikely my mother will ever use it.

But…if you have the tools and the talent, Feed43 will let you take any feedless web page and generate a feed for it. You can find individual sections of the page or repeating segments and turn them into RSS items. This is great for me because there are several sites I find myself occasionally polling to see if there are any updates (because they don’t publish a feed). Now I can easily set up feeds for whatever and just add them to my aggregator.

It will be interesting to see how web site operators handle this. This is obviously a really simple way to screen scrape sites that use ads to generate money. You could easily set up Feed43 to scrape a site and send you back the bits you want, minus the ads. I imagine this will prompt some people to start randomizing their pages a bit or to simply ban traffic from the Feed43 systems. Hopefully there are a few smart people out there who will see this and get a hint to start generating feeds of their content. They could start generating feeds with embedded ads and it would make an easy enough route to get the data that people wouldn’t bother with Feed43.

There’s nothing I can see in the terms of service that would prevent users from generating new feeds and then sharing the URLs with others. Maybe I’ll see if I can come up with some slick ones and post them here.

Update: Reading is good for you. I found the Feed43 FAQ:

Q: Can I share my feeds with others?

A: Of course you can. Just send them a link to your feed, or even place this link on your web site.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Unfiled. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.