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Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom
book

Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

by Ben Hammersley
April 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
270 pages
7h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

From a Search Engine

The current popular search engines have many great features, but they don’t usually provide any form of feed for search results. Such a feed is extremely useful for people trying to keep track of specific search topics (for example, their name).

Google

I personally host a Google-to-RSS service, which you are free to use. It’s at http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/google_to_rss.html. To use it, simply add your search request to the end of the URL http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=. For example:

http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=ben%20hammersley

Now, subscribe to that URL in your newsreader.

Note that I’m running this service from my own Google API key, which has a limit of 1,000 queries a day. If you’d like to help out, you can get your own key from http://www.google.com/apis/ and use it with your own queries. Add it to the URL with a &k=123456789 attribute, like this:

http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/googlerss.cgi?q=ben%20hammersley&k=123456789

The source code for this service is discussed in Chapter 10.

Google News

Google News searches can also be turned into feeds via a service hosted by Julian Bond, found at http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php.

That page has a form to help generate the feed’s URL, or you can make it up yourself with this pattern:

http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php?num=number_of_items&q=your_query

Note that this Google News service is for personal aggregators only and not for redisplay on another web site. The ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008813Supplemental ContentErrata Page