No RSS? Feed43 lets you make your own

I use www.IrisFeed.com - it also allows you to create RSS feeds for a website that doesn't have one.

BUT it also allows you to create Atom and even iTunes Podcast XMl feeds - all for free with no banners and no registration :)

Nice! Have you looked at www.Feedity.com? It works well too, and its very slick (love its simplicity) ... check it out.

Isn't the problem the total user experience rather than technology? The analogy to napster is perfect.

Forget the technology for a moment. Napster got killed but ITunes flourished. The idea is not whether you can digitize music, the key question is whether you can bring value the creator of music. Napster did not bring value to the content creators but ITunes sure did.

Feed43 is good technology. It brings content closer to the user. What it does not do is bring the content creator and the content consumer closer. Till it brings this value, its just reasonably good, hacky technology.

I see some illegally published feeds already:

ProSportsDaily.com probably wouldn't like this one: http://feed43.com/4601624585672733.xml

FactCheck.org might not be a big fan of this: http://feed43.com/1716483175047651.xml

I wonder what TownHall.com would think of their content being redistributed: http://feed43.com/4817051363607806.xml

It's only a matter of time before corporate websites become aware of their content being scraped and redistributed publicly to whoever wants to see it.

Roger,

Why do you differentiate online aggregators and desktop ones? If I use any online aggreagtor to watch scraped feeds personally, this does not violate any law either. Using online aggregator is not the same as publishing the content online. Syndicating scraped feeds (intentionally displaying them to other people) without prior permission of original copyright holder -- this is where the problem begins.

If any online aggregator allows indexing personal user pages, thus actually indexing content of the third-party copyright holder, this is a problem with online aggregator. I personally don't know any aggregator that exposes personal user pages to public.

To summarize: as long as you *read* the scraped content, not *publish* it, there is no violation, no matter which software, desktop or online, you use to read the content.

Igor: Well, technically, you *are* redistributing content. (In fact, you're creating a derivative work.) But your basic point has merit... the web is built on such stuff. As I said somewhere else, when viewed from a certain perspective, the entire web is one giant copyright violation.

If used as a personal proxy, I don't think there's any legitimate argument in opposition to Feed43's service. The problem is that far too many (and arguably most) people don't use RSS via private desktop apps... they read their feeds on Planet portals, in search-engine-accessible online aggregators, and so on. In that context, Feed43 causes problems.

Chris,

There is nothing against DMCA here, because Feed43 does NOT redistribute content from other sites. Again, it is a *personal* *proxy* that allows the owner/creator of the feed view website content from within news aggregator. Do HTTP proxies violate DMCA? Do personal ad-blocking proxies violate DMCA? Something tells me they do not. Think about it.

This is similar to something I started working on a few years ago. Actually, it started as a simple screen scraper before RSS was even invented. Unfortunately I never did get to release the application that allows users to define their own feeds, but there is a handful that I created that people have stumbled across on the web.

http://www.simbolic.net/Software/HTML2RSS/

There used to be another site around a couple of years ago, I think it was called MyRSS that had a database containing thousands of feeds. Anybody remember it or knows what happened to it?

While I've always thought the idea was cool, I think as time goes on more and more sites will continue to add their own feeds, so the value of this stuff actually continues to decline (plus it's a pain to keep those scrape definitions up to date). Hopefully one day every site has an official feed.

This is great - just this past weekend, I was playing around with the RSS feeds on Craigslist, trying to think about the uses. I came up with this idea of generating "alerts" for people doing some apartment hunting in the Seattle area and the result was Cribot.com. All that took only a weekend to put together!

This just goes to show how useful RSS feeds can be and how much information can be gleaned from them. Feed43 will just let you jump on the bandwagon more easily.

"Personally, I’ll be blocking access to Feed43 URLs in my subscription code."

Some sites like sitespaces.net encourage RSS syndication, but some sites don't like facebook. It should be up to the copyright holder, what content to syndicate and what not to.

I'm also going to implement blacklisting.

DMCA - copyright infringement.

You can't redistribute others' copyrighted content without written permission and or licensing fees.

Downloading © content from another website for redistribution is against the DMCA.

This isn't like digg or google news where there is a link to the story.

So, if I read Drudge via Lynx, am I breaking the law?

Robert, What's the "Legal Eagle's" opinion?
How a Web page is used by the end user(2nd Party) is based on the TOS of the publisher(1st Party). Does the 3rd Party's TOS conflict with the 1st Party?
Granted its for a useful purpose because there are a lot of sites without RSS because of ignorance and laziness and its because of this the 3rd party is able to provide a service. "Drawing the fine line" is important for the 2nd Parties legitimacy and sanity. So the REAL question is "Is it Legal?"

Igor: Let me say quickly that I'm not casting aspersions on your motives. I'm sure you intend Feed43 to be a wholly positive service. In the short view, it *is* a positive service.

Hell, I'm not even opposed to the concept behind Feed43. I don't see anything wrong with an individual user of a desktop aggregator using it to subscribe to a feed-free site. I'm not worried about anyone's ad-supported business model, as the AdBlock extension in my browser attests. My machine, my rules.

But when it comes to web-based aggregators and syndication applications, Feed43 starts to look extremely problematic. It opens up aggregator developers to lawsuits based upon the actions of Feed43 users, and makes it easier than ever to redistribute content without authorization. Folks like me keep reminding content producers that they need to take responsibility for how they publish their material, and Feed43 removes one fundamental avenue of responsibility.

Obeying robots.txt is a wonderful thing, and you should be applauded for it. In fact, that alone is enough for me to withdraw the "toxic" statement I made earlier... it demonstrates that you're interested in playing fair.

Perhaps you could take a leadership role in this situation? What if Feed43 evangelized an "all purpose" user-agent for scraping services, one that would make blocking (via robots.txt) a one-step process? In addition to obeying references to "Feed43 Proxy", you could also respect references to "All Scraping Proxies"... other well-meaning service providers could do the same, and blocking those services as a whole would become pretty darned simple.

Richard, the problem you describe is not a problem of Feed43 service (or similar services), but a problem of end user that might use this service in the way content owner doesn't want to. I completely understand that. The only thing I can say, Feed43 tries to play nice and respects copyrights. It is clearly stated in our TOS, and every user must agree to TOS prior to creating any feed. As I said before, we reserve the rights to block access to some sites if the respective site owners ask us to. I think it's pretty fair.

Igor: The buying the magazine comment was specifically in reference to how easy Feed43 makes it for content to be stolen. Using Feed43 the way you are thinking of is one thing, but it also allows people to easily replicate a site's content on other sites or in other feeds. This is a problem RSS feeds already have and it is one reason that sites choose not to have feeds in the first place!

But also, by subverting the way a website author chooses for the content to be displayed, you are potentially destroying the way the website makes money. You "pay" for ad-supported free sites with your eyeballs. And having to opt-out of having your content swiped by setting up a block on your server is not cool.

Your mobile comparison isn't accurate either. For mobile users, websites should follow web standards in using proper XHTML and CSS. And if you really want your site to look good on mobiles, you set a CSS file just for mobile devices. That's how the web was designed. Not ensuring your site looks good on mobiles is lazyness. Blocking screen scrapers from swiping your content is protecting your ad revenue, not to mention your branding and the cohesive look of your website, which is important for many sites.

That's just killed at least on business I can think of in the UK

People are right about this being a toxic service. The Drudge Report is the only website that I still read regularly that is not through RSS because they don't offer one. Using this service it was pretty easy to build one:

http://feed43.com/drudge-report.xml

However I would imagine that Mr. Drudge would be furious if he know about this. Why? Because his entire lively hood is made by selling advertising on the site. Feed43 has enabled me to see the content while stripping away the advertisements.

RSS is killing the ad supported business model.

Richard, you're not right. it's not "buying a magazine, copying the articles and handing them out to people", but "buying a magazine, and reading the articles personally the way one prefers".

Feed43 is a *personal proxy*, not an automatic spider. If the person wants to read the content the way he likes, why not give him an option? Feed43 is intended to work on sites that do not provide feeds at all (most of the sites do not provide feeds just because they don't bother) -- see our TOS for more information. We strongly encourage users not to make feeds for sites that provide their own feeds, and have the sole right to remove some feeds or block access to some sites. However, most people create feeds for their personal sites (just because they do not want to learn how to add RSS support) and to sites that do not provide feeds at all.

Any tool can be used in abusive way, but should we outlaw knives and scissors, for example? You as a website owner has the sole right to ban Feed43 proxy (it identifies itself as 'Feed43 Proxy', so you can deny access to it easily), but it is much like banning all mobile users just because they can't view your site the way you insist them to do.

-- Feed43 author

These types of services are *extremely* toxic to the RSS space... they're the syndication equivalent of Napster, and if they become popular, something's gonna hit the fan.

If a site doesn't have a feed, there's a reason. When someone complains that their feed is being republished somewhere, we typically say things like "hey, you're the one producing a syndication feed." These services undermine that argument, and ensure that anyone running a public aggregator will be visited by lawyers sooner than later.

Personally, I'll be blocking access to Feed43 URLs in my subscription code.

As soon as I find a hack on how to disable these feed sites, I will be doing so on all of my sites. This is nothing more than aggregating somebody else's content. It's buying a magazine, copying the articles and handing them out to people.

There are legitimate uses for a site like this, but this also makes it that much easier for splogs or whatever to steal content. Subversive is absolutely right. It allows one to steal content from sites and republish it. Even if you attribute it to the original site, you're still stealing their ad revenue. Congratulations.

I've been using Feed43 for a few weeks now and really love how much control I have over the output feed. I was quite impressed that I could give it a nasty HTML site and come up with a solid feed.

I'm glad to see more services like this. Maybe if nothing else, it will spur website owners to make their own feeds.

Jeff, Feed43 is planned to support https and POST requests in the future, as well as https access for feeds, thus, making your wishes come true. Currently, I don't know of such a service to be implemented already.


-- Feed43 author.

It would be neat if there was a site like this that would log you into your account at a site and then perform the page extraction. (e.g. a feed for your power consumption, account balances, cell phone minutes remaining, library books due, track your packages you sent, etc.). It would definitely have to be trustworthy to store your credentials. Does anyone know if something like this exists?

Then I can't read it if I'm offline. I set the total feed to cap at 1MB.

What makes Feed43 different from FeedTier, FeedYes and other similar services is that it gives you the ability to specify what and how to translate as RSS. You have the total control on feed presentation. See this, for example:
http://feed43.blogspot.com/2006/01/getting-weat...

Other services just grab all (or some) links from a web page. No content, no images. Pure headlines. Yes, this is easier for end user, but the quality of the resulting feeds is incomparable.

you know, when someone writes 9 page articles, there's maybe a reason for partial feed.

Make that opener - "I wrote." I guess I should finish the first cup of coffee before I post.

It seems it can. How very handy. :)

I've wrote a feature on my own site six months ago that creates full feeds from partial feeds. What I basically do is cache the published feed. Then I go out and follow the link, correct the HTML as best as possible and pull the paragraphs into a basic feed. I've been using these feeds on bloglines for a while and some people have stumbled across them because I see other subsribers on my feeds. It really works well if I configure the feed to work off of the printable version because I'm less likely to pick up grabage from there. If anybody wants to see an example, compare:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/newsfeed/rss/opj_...
to
http://www.bradmurray.com/RSS/WSJOpinionFull

I basically do this because I like to get full feeds for my Axim running Egress. Summary feeds are worthless when you're offline.

I thought about trying to turn this into a service, but there are probably too many copyright issues.