RSS for your blog post hack
A while back I was writing about how to create a feed for a blog post.
Some of my blog posts are list orientated, so I am updating the post all the time, a feed for the blog post enables people to subscribe to it so they are notified about the latest updates on a past blog post.
3 spots blog has done some snooping around and found a webpage monitoring service that will do just the trick.
I use WatchThatPage for website monitoring, this is a great tool, but doesn’t deliver updates as an RSS feed…a similar tool is Website Watcher, I’m not sure if this delivers results in RSS feeds, although it does monitor RSS feeds, along with monitoring the usual HTML…TheWebWatcher also does this.
That is, like all wepage monitoring tools, these 2 services above monitor HTML webpages, but they also monitor RSS feeds…this is handy as sometimes a feed contains different content to the HTML (eg. splicing in your del.icio.us links)…most of us would subscribe to the feed itself anyway.
Back to it…another new monitoring tool is Feedwhip, which I posted on a while back…this monitors a webpage and delivers results as email or as an RSS feed.
This is exactly what I’m looking for to create a feed for a blog post…check out the 3 spots blog post for the explanation and screenshot…lots of filtering options.
Perhaps another way is to use a HTML scraping tool like ponyfish…what you do is enter the blog post into ponyfish and then select text in the post that a typical update structure would look like.
If your blog post is a point form list, then you can select some of these point form texts, which tells ponyfish this is what a typical update will look like. When you make an update, ponyfish will recognise this type of text structure and include it in the feed (if you make an update that doesn’t look like a point form structure, then ponyfish may avoid this).
A blog post I constantly update is RSS: filter and re-mix…here is the feed for this blog post…hope it works.
ADDED: As 3 spots pointed out in a comment (11/5/06 09:25)…another way is to do a site search for a term on your blog, this will generate a feed. Each time you update the blog post, include this term, and the feed will update the latest…if you don’t include this term in an update, then the feed won’t know about it.
eg. each of my posts has an ID, so this can be my term - post794 …here is the search:
site:libraryclips.blogsome.com post794
Here is the feed .
[ADDED 21/05/06: Feedwhip : granular webpage monitoring]
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