Re: Got lost on rss

> on 12/31/2004 11:01 PM maz said the following:
> > Either I need something that works with Magpie, although I don't really
understand what it
> > all does. Or does xpath2rss do everything I need, or do I need both to
make the rss work?
> >
> > This is the closest I've got to getting rss feed from the database, I'm
not a backend
> > developer, I need a working example to follow or simple instructions to
piece together or a
> > volunteer with experience.
>
> Why don't you just generate a real RSS feed instead of hacking your page
>   XHTML output?

There's real value to this idea.  But there are situations where someone
might not use it.  For example, if someone doesn't have the access or the
ability to get to the database directly it might only be possible to use the
web page.  Using web pages this way, scraping as it's known, is not all that
great an idea.  You're limited to using only the data that's present on the
web page.  Many times the database will have better information like dates,
times, categories or other that aren't on the web pages.  Or the web page
formats them in ways that are exceedingly difficult to reformat for proper
use in a feed (like character encodings, dates, etc...).  Finally, the worst
thing about using web page scraping is being dependent on the formatting of
the web page.  If even slight changes are made to the web page layout it
will usually cause a scraper to fail.  There are ways to work around this
but, frankly, the work is better spent on getting actual database access
instead of scraping.

If it's your own site and you have access to it's database then it's much
better to go that route.

-Bill Kearney
Syndic8.com



 
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