Just under a year ago I wrote about three websites that allowed users to generate RSS feeds from static web pages. The most promising provider looked like Feed43, however I never really gave it a thorough test. After a couple of years of manually checking the City and County of Swansea jobs web page for updates, I finally decided to spend the 15 minutes required to create the RSS version of the page using the afore mentioned service. The result is available at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SwanseaJobs

For a user without basic HTML experience, I think using the Feed43 system might prove a little tricky, however for those with some mark-up knowledge, they should find the pattern matching mechanism quite powerful, resulting in more accurate feeds than those generated by the other sites I listed, FeedYes and Feedmaker, if indeed they could even manage to produce a feed in the first place.

For those interested in how I set-up the RSS feed, the Swansea jobs page is located at http://www.swansea.gov.uk/jobs. Using this as the source page address at feed43.com, I set-up the following item (repeatable) search pattern to pull out each job listed on the page:

<p ALIGN="left"><b>{*}
<a name="{%}"></a> {*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}</p>{*}
<p>{*}

The text matched and extracted using {%} is added to a list of per-item search results, whereas {*} matches are discarded. This therefore allowed me to set my RSS item titles as {%2} (the job title), the link template as http://www.swansea.gov.uk/jobs#{%1} and the content as

{%5}<br />
<br />
{%6}

Unfortunately the HTML mark-up of the jobs page is not perfect which results in an invalid portion of content in many cases. I know that Feedburner has an option to make feeds validate, so this is one of the reasons why I have piped the resulting feed through the Feedburner service.

Over all I found the Feed43 system quite straight forward to use and it also has some nice little extras too, such as being able to email a summary of the feed name, feed URL and URL for editing to a designated email address for reference. Well worth a go if you want to keep tabs on new jobs or other regularly updated items on a static web page that does not offer a RSS or Atom version to subscribe to.

This post is tagged: generator, html, jobs, rss, static, swansea