Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

Ever run into a website that doesn’t offer any feeds, RSS/Atom/RDf/Etc? Now with sites like Feed43, FeedTier or Feeds2B you can! quickly and easily create a feed for any site. Let’s see what each of these sites has to offer.

Feed43

Feed43 is great for anyone that understands regular expressions. Building a feed took me a couple of minutes even though I didn’t quite understand how to combine the parsing with template generation. The regular expression back reference syntax is a bit confusing to the untrained; it would be nice to see named groups, %{name} for example, rather than the plain Perl-esque %1 notation for capured content.

FeedTier

FeedTier is your choice if you require ease of use. FeedTier analyzes the webpage you submit, automatically chooses content groups from the markup and produces a feed with one click. Perfect for a simply structured website like a Little League schedule or in my case a ski racing league’s info/news page.

Feeds2B

Feeds2B is for the most part as simple as FeedTier but is perfect for a site that doesn’t have the most simple markup. Once you submit your URL to Feeds2B a real person will create the feed for you based upon their knowledge of regular expression. Your feed will not be ready instantly, but for a website with varying HTML/markup this might be your only option for feed conversion.

The view out my office is pretty boring… I get to stare out at the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, but I enjoy watching all the fire trucks and emergency vehicles scream down Western Avenue the most. I always wondered where are they going and now that I’ve found Seattle Fire Department’s Real-Time 911 Fire Dispatch I’m always in the know. Boy, I really love technology. Is the raw data alone not interesting? Then go check out this Google Maps + Seattle Real-Time 911 mashup.