XML Hacks

Create RSS 0.91 Feeds from Google

A .NET program can help you create an RSS feed based on a query to Google. You have to be a registered developer at Google to use this program, but the possibilities are rich.

Peter Drayton (http://www.razorsoft.net/) has created a .NET program called google2rss that uses a Google API (http://www.google.com/apis/) query to create an RSS 0.91 feed [Hack #81] with the top 10 hits it finds on Google. You first have to go to the Google API web page to register so that you can get a license key. You cannot perform this hack without getting the license key. You will also need to install Microsoft .NET on your system. You can download .NET from Microsoft’s MSDN site, http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/technologyinfo/howtoget/, or you can get it from http://www.gotdotnet.com. You’ll need to download both the .NET Framework Version 1.1 Redistributable Package (about 24 MB) and the .NET Framework SDK Version 1.1 (about 108 MB).

Download the google2rss software from http://www.razorsoft.net/downloads/google2rss.zip. You can also read background information at http://www.razorsoft.net/weblog/stories/2002/04/13/google2rss.html.

Fortunately, the google2rss download includes source code, because after I extracted the archive, I discovered that I had to recompile the program to get it to work with .NET v1.1. That’s because the binary in the archive was compiled with .NET v1.0. A copy of the recompiled program is in the file archive that is offered with ...