World of Warcraft Feed Goodness

Hello, fellow Sports Racers, I just wanted to let you know that I've fixed the feeds for the official WoW message boards. As you might know, the official boards finally got their long overdue total overhaul, and thus the scraper didn't know what to do with them anymore.

Well, I've fixed that. The new RSS feed for the official WoW US message boards is here. Please note that, just like the old feed, this one needs a bit of configuration. In laymen's terms, you need to tell the feed which forum to display as RSS. An example:

This is the base RSS feed URL:

http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/forums_worldofwarcraft_com_new.php?forumId=

See the "?forumId=" parameter at the end? You need to add the forum number from the official boards there. Let's say you want a feed for the Shaman forum, then you visit the forum and take a look at its URL:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=10021&sid=1

See the forumID parameter? It says "10021". This is the forum ID for the Shaman forum. Now take that number and add it to the base URL of the feed:

http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/forums_worldofwarcraft_com_new.php?forumId=10021

And there you have your feed for the Shaman forum. Easy, isn't it? Have fun. :)

In more European-centric news, I've added a feed for the new Spanish WoW site. Hola!

Oh, and there's a feed for the EU message boards. Same principle as the US forum feed.

http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/forums_wow-europe_com_new.php?forumId=

That's it for the day/week/month. Happy news reading, everyone.

UPDATE 2006-09-15: The info and feed for the EU message boards has been changed, too! See the updated details and URL above.

The end of custom feed hosting...

Hi, how you doing, long time no talk. Listen, I've decided to turn off all "broken and expired" custom feeds within the next few days. When I say "broken and expired", I mean the following thing:

Let's say you've got a custom feed with me. The feed is broken since the original site underwent some changes, and we're over the first year of free maintenance. Now, up until now I would've asked whether you'd like me to repair the feed (after paying for another year), and depending on your answer I'd adjust the scraper or just turn off the feed.

And that's what I've changed now. Due to a quite busy schedule I'm afraid I'm not able to keep up anymore. So if the feed's free maintenance period is over, and the feed breaks, I'll just turn it off.

Of course, if a feed breaks, and we're still in the free maintenance period, I'll fix it quietly -- that was the deal, and naturally I'll honor that.

Anyways, that's the lowdown.

If you're scratching your head now, wondering how to get a new custom feed, then take a look at Feed43.com. It's a free self-service, umm, service that allows you to build your own scraped feeds. Give it a try, it's pretty nice. (And no, I'm not affiliated with them.)

Oh, and this will not affect the feeds on the front page -- I have a personal interest in having them, so basically these are just "personal" feeds I share with the world. :)

Cheers.
C.

Shameless plug: Firefox extension BetterShopper

While working on my servers tonight I noticed I had just updated BetterShopper, one of my Firefox extensions. Now imagine my surprise... ;)

What's it do, you ask?

It can convert all displayed Amazon.com/.co.uk/.de/.ca/.fr/.co.jp prices to your favourite currency: US$, CDN$, EUR, GBP or JPY. And it'll do so using daily updated currency exchange rates!

Also BetterShopper will lookup the prices of the currently displayed Amazon product in over a dozen stores across the web, and then it'll display those in a neat little box right there on your current page. All that without the need for you to leave Amazon.

Fancy a look?

Well, off to work on my servers again... Cheers!

[ADDED] The Colbert Nation

Just scraped the blog/news section of the website of one of my favourite TV shows, The Colbert Report.

The new feed is here, hope you'll like it.

Spread the word, watch the show!

[REPAIRED] Planetary Society Headlines

The feed for the Planetary Society's news headlines was slightly screwed up, so the feed didn't show all news. I've just fixed that.

On a related note, congratulations to the members of the Planetary Society for the (apparently) successful launch of COSMOS 1! :)

100k Requests Per Day!

Ladies and gents, I'm proud to announce that yesterday we broke the magical marker of 100.000 RSS requests/day. That's right. For the first time in its existence, my little Feedpalooza site here was delivering a 6-digit number of feed requests in one single day.

Not bad, I'd say! :) Looks like there's a certain demand for RSS feeds, eh? (Take note, RSS-less site owners! Do your homework.)

So, here's to the next personal record, oh, I don't know, let's say 5 million requests per month or something. In the meantime, if you feel like, think a moment of whether my feed service here is useful to you or not, and if it is, consider dropping a buck or two the big, empty Feedpalooza tipping jar. Helps with the hosting cost and all that. :)

Cheers!

May I tell you about...

...my newest project, a Firefox extension called BetterShopper, which makes your Amazon online shopping a tad easier? It can convert all displayed Amazon.com/.co.uk/.de/.ca/.fr prices to your favourite currency: US$, CDN$, EUR or GBP. And it'll do so using daily updated currency exchange rates!

Also BetterShopper will lookup the prices of the currently displayed Amazon product in over a dozen stores across the web, and then it'll display those in a neat little box right there on your current page. All that without the need for you to leave Amazon.

So, maybe you want to try it out? If not, it's okay, too. I'm just saying.

[UPDATE] EuroGamer.net

Apparently EuroGamer.net was relaunched which made my scraped feeds break. So, I've fixed them.

At that point I noticed EG is sporting three new categories (PSP, DS, next gen), so I've added feeds for those three sections, too.

[REPAIRED] European World of Warcraft News

The feeds for the Official European WoW Sites were slightly kaputt (read: broken), so I've fixed them. They validate again, so all is well in WoW feed land now.

Have a good one.

[ADDED] 120 New Feeds: World Of Warcraft - Official Forums

You might be interested that I've just taken the liberty to build RSS feeds for all the official World of Warcraft forums. So, that's ~120 new feeds for today. :)

As always, you can find the list on the Feedpalooza main page.

The single feeds are updated every 15 minutes and contain the most recent 75 headlines of the selected message board. It's rather handy to keep an eye on a particular forum using the feeds; I for one use the feeds to monitor the Realm Status and the UI forum.

May Elune guide you. :)

Link Bugfixes

I just noticed (after a friendly hint from a feed subscriber, thanks) that the conversion of relative links to absolute links doesn't always work. So, I fixed that, and that means that image and link tags should work as supposed now.

Of course that means that for some feeds some old items might appear updated even if they look the same, because the items have changed markup-wise. Not all of them, but a few. If they do, please keep in mind that they don't do that everytime now, but just once.

In the end it only means the scraped feeds should work better than before, you know. :)

While we're at it, if you're using one or more of my feeds, please consider whether they are worth a few quarters for you or not. I'm dishing out ~400MB/day, and even tho I have a great, yet affordable hosting deal and haven't hit my monthly bandwidth allowance yet, you might want to chip in anyways. It isn't mandatory, of course. Consider it a token of appreciation. If you appreciate what I'm doing here. ;)

Have a nice day, y'all.
-Carlo

[ADDED] European World of Warcraft News

I've added three new feeds for the European World of Warcraft Community Site. Consider it a shout-out to my fellow Europeans and WoW addicts. :)

- Official Euro WoW News, English edition
- Official Euro WoW News, German edition
- Official Euro WoW News, French edition

Please note that in both German and French feeds there may be occasional character encoding problems with some special/local characters. I tried to fix it, but there's only so much I can do. :)

Have fun.

[ADDED] IGN PSP & DS Feeds

I was just told by a frequent IGN.com reader that IGN has added news sections for those new handhelds the kids go crazy about these days, i.e. a PSP channel and a DS channel. He was wondering if I could make some feeds for those channels, too, since I've already made feeds for all the other IGN sections.

Well, I sure can. Have fun.

[PROBLEMS] Daily Show Feeds

The feeds for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart are currently b0rked, because the DS website is partially broken.

As soon as their site is working again, the feeds will be updated again.

Gmail Accounts

I have 10 Gmail accounts sitting here, if anyone is interested, mail me at <carlo at g-blog dot net>.

Cheers!