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[Geek] Unofficial RSS feeds with Dapper
Feb. 1st, 2009 09:54 pm(Not Dapper Drake: unfortunate namespace collision. A contraction of "data mapper".)
Dapper is a website which handles screen-scraping sensibly, taking several pages and parsing them to extract the static and dynamic data. It can export these as XML, RSS feeds, or data/components for any number of popular web2.0 services.
The reason I ended up playing around with this was after getting annoyed with Tor.com's annoyingly arsy attitude towards RSS feeds - they provide one, with everything in, instead of adding a feed for the particular author or tag you're interested in. However, since they're aiming to be a "focal point for SF fandom", they pile together book re-reads, discussions of last night's $TV_Show, advice to authors, fananism, artblogging, and Weird Stuff They Found on the Internet all in one, and it's pretty spammy.
I like reading weird things as much as anyone, but since I don't have the time to wade through everything (and, admittedly, partly on principle) I set up a "dapp" to sort the posts by author and RSS me links & contracted text. For instance, this is the dapp created from this page, and the (first parts of the) individual posts just show up in my RSS reader.
Dapper is a website which handles screen-scraping sensibly, taking several pages and parsing them to extract the static and dynamic data. It can export these as XML, RSS feeds, or data/components for any number of popular web2.0 services.
The reason I ended up playing around with this was after getting annoyed with Tor.com's annoyingly arsy attitude towards RSS feeds - they provide one, with everything in, instead of adding a feed for the particular author or tag you're interested in. However, since they're aiming to be a "focal point for SF fandom", they pile together book re-reads, discussions of last night's $TV_Show, advice to authors, fananism, artblogging, and Weird Stuff They Found on the Internet all in one, and it's pretty spammy.
I like reading weird things as much as anyone, but since I don't have the time to wade through everything (and, admittedly, partly on principle) I set up a "dapp" to sort the posts by author and RSS me links & contracted text. For instance, this is the dapp created from this page, and the (first parts of the) individual posts just show up in my RSS reader.
