This is a short guide to creating an RSS feed for sites that don’t have one. I’ve posted it here because I keep forgetting how to do it. Hope it’s useful. NB: it won’t work for sites that require a log-on, such as Facebook groups.
Step One: Problem Pages
I try to remember to visit the site of my old colleagues at startups.co.uk for news related to starting online businesses. The reporting is good quality and they quite often get stories that aren’t covered in my regular reading. However, they don’t have an RSS feed and so it falls outside my regular updates through Google Reader.
Copy the address of the page you want to generate a feed for to the clipboard. It needs to be the page that lists all the recent stories on the site, or section of the site, not one of the pages for individual stories.
Step Two: Go to FeedYes
The free online service FeedYes creates feeds from pages that don’t offer one. There are various other alternatives, but this one works, so I’ve stuck with it. You have to register to use it, but this takes five seconds, and you could even use a fake email address if you wanted.
Step Three: Create a new FeedYes Feed
It’s the first option in the navigation. Here you enter the address you copied from the site. Also give it a tag, such as ‘internet’ and specify the language, if it isn’t English.
Step Four: Prune the Feed
FeedYes grabs all the links on the page and creates a list. You then click on the first item on the list that is a proper news item, rather than a static link such as a navigation link or special feature. In the next step, you click on the last item that contains news. This allows the service to identify the code that indicates a news item.
Step Five: Save the Feed Address
The service gives you an address that looks something like this:
http://www.feedyes.com/feed.php?f=aJEC6T5Uz0h52Rfj
You can use FeedYes as an RSS reader, but I can’t really recommend that. Instead, copy the address to the clipboard and switch to your normal reader (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines, or an offline reader) and choose the option to add a new feed.
Paste in the address and …Ta-da! You’re done. You’ll notice that unless you’re very lucky, you won’t end up with a full content feed – it depends on how much is printed on the page you’re working from. Nonetheless, it means that you are now getting updates from sites that otherwise might have fallen off your radar.
If you work on an older site yourself, you could use this method to generate a feed for your own news pages. If that’s the case, I’d recommend putting the feed URL through the feedburner service to give it a slightly more elegant address, such as mybrand.feedburner.com. You can also add niceties such as a custom logo and options like ‘digg this’ and ‘add to del.icio.us’ to each story.
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I’ve been using Feed43.com for a while but this is a much better solution, a lot easier to set-up certainly!
Thanks, Ian – incredibly useful.
Hi Ian – nice post. Will definitely be sharing it with a few colleagues as there are plenty of applications for this!
cheers,
sw