Feed Those Cheers
I’m hooked on 43 Things, 43 Places, & All Consuming, all products of the brilliant and busy team at The Robot Co-op. I think the best feature shared by all these sites is Cheers, a simple positive feedback device that makes it quick and easy to show your appreciation for what another person has contributed.
Another great feature built into all the sites created by the Robots is the plentitude of RSS feeds. There are feeds for entries, goals, people, places, books, music, comments, teammates, etc. Just about everything has a feed. But there are no feeds for Cheers. There is no web service method for accessing Cheers. And there is no aggregation of Cheers across their sites. Cheers appear to be something of a “walled garden”. Cheers are, of course, listed below all “cheered” entries, comments, goals, what have you, and they are aggregated per site for each user to view in a web browser, but for a feed junkie like me who often prefers to have my information flow to me, what I really want is a feed for Cheers.
So I made my own Cheers feeds using the free online service Feed43. (Funny that the name should contain the number 43, but there is no relation to 43 Things or The Robot Co-op that I know of.) Of all the screen-scraping feed-creating services out there, this one is the best that I’ve used so far. What it gives you that most others do not is precise control over what to extract from a web page and how to display it in the resulting feed. And it’s quite easy to use. In just a few minutes I was able to create feeds for Cheers I’ve received at 43 Things, 43 Places, and All Consuming.
For the 43 Things and Places Cheers pages, here are the extraction rules I used:
Global Search Pattern:
<ul class="cheers-list">{%}<p class="seeall">
Item Search Pattern:
<li><a href="{%}">{%}</a><a href="{%}">{%}</a>{%}</li>
And here’s how I defined the output format so as to match what you see in your web browser:
Item Content Template:
<a href="{%1}">{%2}</a> <a href="{%3}">{%4}</a> {%5}
For All Consuming, it’s a little different:
Global Search Pattern:
</h2>{%}<p>
Item Search Pattern:
<li><a href="{%}">{%}</a> <a href="{%}">{%}</a>{%}</li>
Item Content Template:
<a href="{%1}">{%2}</a><a href="{%3}">{%4}</a> {%5}
The Feed43 FAQ states that the feeds you create with their service will be updated no more often than every 6 hours, which is good enough for me. And though Feed43 feeds aren’t, structurally speaking, the greatest, they’re good enough. Feeds for Cheers built by the Robots themselves would be the best solution (hint hint).
The only question remaining is: will the universe implode if I add my screen-scraped Cheers feeds to my 43 People Feed? Can you say feedback loop?
Update: I’m no longer subscribed to the feeds I created using Feed43. It turns out the screen scrape had a very hard time acurately recognizing changes from day to day. So back to the drawing board.