FEED43 Reviewed

Filed in: Reviews, Technology, Web — March 8th, 2006

Previously, I introduced you to FEED43, a free online service that converts any web page to news feeds. I have received my FEED43 invitation code and created a feed for a website that provides no feed.

FEED43 Tour

I am going to use FEED43 to create a feed for Project Petaling Street (PPS). PPS is a Malaysian blog-tal that does not provide feeds. It takes only three steps to create a FEED43 feed.

Step 1. Specify source page address

FEED43 - Step 1 - specify source page address

Supply the website address of the page you want to work on. In this case, we use “http://www.petalingstreet.org”. FEED43 will automatically detect the web page encoding or you can specified a custom encoding.

Press the “Reload” button and FEED43 will read web page source. It will be displayed it in the text box with color coding.

Step 2. Define extraction rules

In order to create the feed, you need to specify the content that is to be included in the feed. Therefore, we need to use search patterns. Search patterns are used to search and extract contents from page source.

FEED43 - Step 2 - search pattern

Use “{*}” to ignore the parts you don’t need, and use “{%}” to specify the parts to be include in the feed. That’s simple! If your search patterns are successful, you will get a list of clipped data.

FEED43 - Step 2 - clipped data

Step 3. Define output format

You are almost done. Now, we need to define the RSS item properties such as item title, item link, and item content, based on the clipped data showed earlier.

FEED43 - Step 3 - Define output format

You can preview the feed by clicking the “Preview” button.

Finally, you get your custom feed at bottom of the page. You will be given a random feed URL but you can change it by clicking “Change file name” link. Here, I changed the feed name to pps.xml.

Done. Here is the PPS feed by FEED43: http://feed43.com/pps.xml (with excerpt). Or, http://feed43.com/pps2.xml (without excerpt).

My two cents

With FEED43’s help, it is quite easy to create a site feeds for any website. However, please note that FEED43 will only update the feed content every 6 hours. It is too slow for a frequent updated website like PPS.

feed43

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Jessica
@LcF. I'm using blogger service for my blog, and it is embedded with Atom 0.3 feed. But it is not shown at the page like yours......why?

Anyhow, what is a feed for???

I know you're a pro, don't laugh at me ok?!

UncleJim
Thanks for the effort, LcF! That's really useful. I hope we can do something about the 6-hour update.

UncleJim
From Feed43 FAQ: How often does Feed43 pulls data from the source web site?

Source web site is pulled at the time you request your feed from within news reader, but not more often than every 6 hours. You are strongly recommended to obey this polling interval (see documentation on you news reader for controlling this behavior), otherwise your IP may be blocked temporarily or permanently, depending on the severity of abuse.

Sarah
With FEED43’s help, it is rather easy to create a site feed for any website.

Speak for yourself. I'm not a geek or techy like you, Liew. I can't make heads or tails of the code.

LcF
@Jessiica: I am using FeedBurner to generate user friendly feed. A feed is used to notify your feed readers about your website updates.

@UncleJim: If FEED43 offer paid service, I think they will reduce the update time gap.

@Sarah: Opps! I am sorry. It is much easier than writing the code by myself...