Many years have passed since the plans to recreate RSSWatch began to come to life again, after the first disappointment when the pages were first closed. I do not intend to be long-striped as I usually am here, but now we see the light in the tunnel again.
This weekend I started an experiment, that resultet in a pre-handling feature in upcoming netcurl 6.1.5 that uses DOMDocuments to scan for DOMElements and then export them to easy handled arrays. This led me to an experimental extraction of HTML-content that could very simply convert to RSS-data. This ability doesn’t make this API a “forwarding RSS-monitor” (you know, centralized RSS-reading). No! It converts standard HTML to RSS links too!
As said – this is the first successful try to awaken the project agan and the target is primarily generate RSS-feeds from sites that normally does not support a proper format. To make this right, where the scanner resides, we have added a user-agent to the datafetcher: “FeedReader ToolsAPIv1.0 FeedBot“. Just to make sure it is done right.
As earth616 writes at their page:
The purpose of this project is to attract visitors to the sites that we actually monitor. By giving more instant information from respective site where visitors can quickly jump into, without being forced to monitor a mail-feed or enter a website each day, the intentions with this project is to actually auto update users that is interested in the content.
With automation we can also start offer “featured content” with a single page where content are collected with RSS data, so it can be quickly shared over for example Facebook or your own customized website.
So let’s start running! There are several secondary servers around the world that is currently looking for data and the collects them inside a container at the ToolsAPI that you can find here: https://tools.tornevall.net/api/rss.