Bend.com Needs RSS

Okay, Bend.com seriously needs an RSS feed. I’m seriously considering writing a script to scrape their archive page for headlines and producing one myself.

Comments

10 responses to “Bend.com Needs RSS”

  1. Jake Ortman Avatar

    agreed, and I’m in the process (Read: when I have free time) of writing up a letter to Spencer over there. Barney, their reporter, agrees with us, but it’s all up to Spencer. I’ll put your name on it, too, if you’d like.

  2. Jon Avatar

    Sure, put my name on it. Why’s it need to go through Spencer though? Something like that is fairly quick and easy to do… considering they already have the data in their database.

  3. Barney Lerten Avatar
    Barney Lerten

    Well I think there’s the idea of common courtesy, after all, it’s his site – plus maybe he’s already working on something like that, or would have some input on it.

  4. Jon Avatar

    Gotcha. I was actually thinking about it from a programmer point of view– as in, I didn’t know Spencer was a programmer, so why would it go through him in that case?

    Not to imply that anyone should implement a feature behind the boss’s back, of course.

    I anxiously await the day, then. πŸ™‚

  5. Jesse Thompson Avatar

    I’m thinking about drawing up some RSS feeds for Metastar and such. What RSS version would you lot recommend, and what’s a good newsreader? I can’t find a good newsreader. :]

    – – Jesse

  6. Jon Avatar

    I’d recommend using RSS 2.0, and not worry about any of the other variants or previous versions. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss

    As for a good aggregator, on Windows I’m using SharpReader, which is free: http://www.sharpreader.net/

  7. Jesse Thompson Avatar

    Okiley. Well someone beat me to making a Homestar Runner RSS, so I went ahead and made one for bend.com
    http://my.bend.com/news/news-test.rss

    Let me know if that is lacking anything blatantly important (it validates, and looks ok in SharpReader, but phpGroupWare seems to dislike it *boggle*), and I’ll change the url when it’s ready for prime time.

    – – Jesse

  8. Jon Avatar

    Cool, I’ll have to check this out on SharpReader when I get home (don’t run an aggregator at work). But when I tried to load that up in IE, I’m getting an error; it either can’t find the file, or is not serving the Content-type: directly. (Content-type should be "application/xml", I’ve noticed, to be viewable in IE.)

  9. Jesse Thompson Avatar

    Donka, give it another go. I had a flag backwards so it was trying to serve the file as a downloadable attachment (we’ve got many "download the xml for this cruft" links on our intranet πŸ™‚
    So now it will serve as "text/xml; qs=0.9" which IE and Firefox appear to like. I don’t know if that’s a better or worse mime type to use, but I must have read bout it somewhere and made it the default at some point πŸ™‚

    – – Jesse

  10. Jon Avatar

    Sweet! That’s right on the money. As far as the MIME type works, that’s all I care about πŸ™‚

    Should this be considered live yet, or still in testing?