DZone Top Links Feed

I have a problem: The DZone Top Links section is great but doesn't support an RSS feed. It has feeds for just about everything else. This would be like digg or tweetmeme not having a feed for their most popular links. What makes it worse is I read a majority of their Top Links, but in order to do so I have to keep a tab open in firefox. Wouldn't it be great if I could just subscribe via Google Reader? And now thanks to Yahoo Pipes's screen scrapping capability you can.

Click this link to subscribe to the DZone Top Links Feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/jlorenzen/dzonetoplinks.

This was accomplished by cloning my RssHuskerPedia pipe and changing a few things around. These pipes depend on the Fetch Page module which essentially lets you scrap the page allowing you to create a list. This feed doesn't contain all the metadeta that would normally come from an official DZone feed, but it supports the basics and prevents me from missing great articles that I would have normally missed.

Please vote this up on DZone to get the word out and hopefully DZone will create an official one. If it gets voted up enough and makes it to the Top Links section, hopefully you won't get stuck in an infinite loop.

Using Yahoo Pipes screen scraping to create an RSS Feed

The internet amazes me. Every time I use it, or write something for it, I continue to be blown away. Take for example, my favorite website for Husker information: http://www.huskerpedia.com (for those that don't know, what I mean by husker information is Nebraska Cornhusker Football. I was born in Nebraska so I naturally follow the cornhuskers.). Someone takes the time to consolidate all husker information and updates this site. It is the de facto standard for Husker news. Unfortunately, this site does not come with any type of notifications via an RSS feed.

Now this site does not necessarily amaze me, but rather how I can take a tool like Yahoo Pipes, scrape the latest news, and in a couple of hours subscribe to that feed in Google Reader. Not only that, but I cloned Paul Arterburn's Huskerpedia Pipe to get started and now everyone can take advantage of my new feed by either subscribing to it, making it better, or cloning it for their own use.

This would make the second time I have used Yahoo Pipes to accomplish something complex very easily. Several months ago, I created a pipe called the Gestalt Shared Feed, that combined all of my co-workers shared items from their Google Reader feed. This allowed us to read the best of the best among ourselves and has really helped our communication. I think we have about 10 people who share items and many more who subscribe to it.

Check out my RssHuskerPedia Pipe and view the source if you are curious. See below for the before and after.