Introduction to Web Site Development

Most blogs, cms, forums, etc. automatically generate rss feeds. However most ‘custom-built’ web sites do not have this features. So, many pages that would be perfect candidates for the ’subscription approach’ offered by rss do not offer them. For example ‘what’s happening’ pages and today pages at companies and school districts would be perfect candidates (see e.g. http://www.bloomu.edu/today).

In these situations you can try some tools that will attempt – with more or less success depending on the coding of the web pages – to generate rss feeds from any given web page. Basically, these tools ’scrape’ the code of the pages, looking at the structure based on headers, paragraphs,… and then create the regular rss format for you.

Two such tools are Feedity (http://feedity.com/) and Feed43 (http://feed43.com/) Type in a url, go through the steps where you identify what should be part of the feed and you can sometimes create an rss feed from your pages. The feed will have a url at feedity’s and can be used like other feeds.