rss-feeds 8

A cool thing about Google Spreadsheets is that you can scrape websites using external data functions like importHtml. It’s really easy to use. The formula: =importHtml("http://www.imdb.com/chart/top", "table", 1) imports the Internet Movie Database top 250 table on to Google Spreadsheets. Since you can publish these as RSS feeds, it ought to, in theory, be a great way of generating RSS feeds out of arbitrary content. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t auto update. There are claims that it does every hour. Maybe it does when the sheet is open. I don’t know. But it definitely does not when the sheet is closed. I wrote a simple script that logs the time at which the script was accessed, and prints the log every time it is accessed. ...

I’m thinking of buying a digital keyboard with touch sensitive keys and MIDI support. (The one other thing that I thought off – a pitch bend – puts the keyboards out of my budget.) I’d like a good deal. (Who doesn’t?) But I don’t like to spend time searching for one. (Who does?) So here’s the plan. Firstly, I’ll restrict my search to Amazon.co.uk. For electronics items, I haven’t found anyone consistently cheaper. Tesco has some pretty low prices, but not the range. eBuyer is pretty good, but not often enough. Google Products is the only other one that gets me consistent lower prices, but I’ve had my credit card identity stolen once before while shopping online, so I’d rather not pick any random seller listed on Google. ...

I’d written earlier about Web lookup in Excel. I showed an example how you could create a movie wishlist that showed the links to the torrents from Mininova. You can do that even easier on Google Spreadsheets. It has 4 functions that let you import external data: =importData(“URL of CSV or TSV file”). Imports a comma-separated or tab-separated file. =importFeed(URL).vLets you import any Atom or RSS feed. =importHtml(URL, “list” | “table”, index). Imports a table or list from any web page. =importXML(“URL”,“query”). Imports anything from any web page using XPath. Firstly, you can see straight off why it’s easy to view RSS feeds in Google Spreadsheets. Just use the importFeed function straight away. So, for example, if I wanted to track all 8GB iPods on Google Base, I can import its feed in Google Spreadsheets. ...

If a site doesn't have an RSS feed, your simplest option is to use Page2Rss, which gives a feed of what's changed on a page. My needs, sometimes, are a bit more specific. For example, I want to track new movies on the IMDb Top 250. They don't offer a feed. I don't want to track all the other junk on that page. Just the top 250. There's a standard called XPath. It can be used to search in an HTML document in a pretty straightforward way. Here are some examples: ...

I’ve stopped visiting websites. No, really. There’s only one website I visit these days. Google Reader. Google Reader is a feed reader. If you want to just catch up on the new stuff on a site, you can add the site to Google Reader. Anything new that is published on the site appears in Google Reader. Right now, I’ve subscribed to over 50 feeds. There’s no way I can remember to visit 50 sites – so I’m actually able to read more and miss less. ...

Top 500 blogs. Each month, Feedster brings you a list of 500 of the most interesting and important blogs. Enjoy browsing to see what people are reading, to find feeds that will bring topics of interest to you… and to discover new voices in the Blogosphere.

I’m trying a couple of experiments with my blog. One is a feed of sorts that shows recently updated blogs. I’m conducting a trial with a few blogs I read, on the right-side tab “Recently updated blogs”. The last 3 posts of the blogs updated within 3 days one-and-half days show up here (using their RSS feed). The other is creating an online catalog of digital resources I’ve encountered. Right now, I’ve put in books (fiction) I’ve read soft copies of on the right side tab “My fiction collection”. I’m planning to add non-fiction, music and movies. ...

My RSS feed is back.