Bootleg RSS (for Mossberg and National Corridors)
As time goes on, I’ve found that I’ve been increasingly shifting my internet reading habits from mailing lists (which now get auto-filed into a rarely-visited folder) and random surfing (which is too addictive) to RSS/Atom feed reading (mostly through Somniphobia). There are still a few syndication-less holdouts that I like to read, which is why I was so glad to see Carlo Zottmann’s offer to create a “bootleg” RSS feed for any site, and to maintain it for a year, for the reasonable fee of $2 per feed. Here are two that I paid for:
- Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology, articles from the respected Wall Street Journal’s tech reviewer’s fiefdom
- Destination: Freedom, the National Corridors Initiative’s weekly update on rail transportation issues
July 27th, 2004 at 4:52 pm
Sometimes, a site will have a hidden or third-party RSS feed. I usually google for “[blog name] RSS” before I resort to an RSS creator. That’s how I found Plastic’s RSS feed.
July 27th, 2004 at 5:07 pm
Yeah, good point, I forgot to mention that. It’s also worth poking around if the blog is hosted on TypePad, BlogSpot, or LiveJournal, because those sites often create RSS/Atom feeds that the blog author might not know or care to point to.
Incidentally, one more old standby that I recently discovered a feed for is James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation (feed). I had all but given up hope, because his official site is such a mess of 1995-era HTML hackery.
July 27th, 2004 at 7:42 pm
Yeah, I do a search for a feed, figuring either they have one or someone somewhere created one that scrapes the info. Otherwise I make one with myrss.com. They’re free, but if someone sponsors the feed then you get to bypass their ads.