Follow changes to sites without RSS feeds with GReader | Hacker News Reader

Follow changes to sites without RSS feeds with GReader

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31 pointsjohns31 comments

Damn. Just tested it on a site that I lost interest in [1] because a feed isnt offered. The service doesnt work for the particular site because there is an RSS feed, but it contains the wrong content. :(

[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/section/Diary if anyone cares. The RSS feed points to the main page rather than the diaries page.

Have you tried http://www.feedbeater.com ?

More specifically: http://www.diffbot.com/api/rss/http://www.kuro5hin.org/secti...

Disclosure: I hung out with the guys who did that site last summer.

No, I haven't! Thank you!

Maybe you can create a yahoo! Pipe to filter the content you want ?

I use the Firefox extension Update Scanner to much the same effect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362. No complaints so far, although my use has been mild. Note that you'll need to install via the beta channel if you've got Firefox 3.6.

I think this could be a really good source of data for Google. If a lot people use this it could be used as one more way to ensure search quality.

Agreed. And it's a great way to crowdsource checking of "What parts of this page are meaningful?" (Provided there's a way to give feedback)

I think personalization is the only way to reduce web spam.

People interested in this might like a site I launched a while back:

http://www.readfresh.com

Feedback is appreciated!

I've been using http://www.changedetection.com/ but this would be a nice change - less email for me ;)

If this gains wide usage, it could be a boon to RSS adoption. Users could eventually learn to think of websites as collections of changing content, so they'll have less difficulty accepting the use case that RSS offers.

Some people might even think RSS is introduced as an enhancement to this Google feature.

(Or maybe this implementation will become so solid that RSS becomes unnecessary, but I doubt it.)

The catch-22 is that this feature would be used by people who use Google Reader and thus who know of RSS and its benefits.

Understood, but I can imagine a website displaying a button for "Get notified when we add new information" or something to that effect. Personally, I'd love to see more these buttons on local government websites, which are notorious for not having RSS feeds. So people might begin to use Google Reader upon discovering this new feature.

Cool stuff. I have been using Sucuri's Network Integrity monitor for the same thing... I monitor my own sites and some pages that I am interested to be notified when they change.

That can be very useful as an intrusion detection system if your pages are modified without you knowing it.

Link for sucuri: http://sucuri.net

This takes me back... Internet Explorer 5 for Mac used to support a widely lauded feature similar to this, where you could "subscribe" to a page and it would tell you when it updated.

RSS pretty much obsoleted the feature and I have never seen it in a browser since. There have definitely been times when it would be useful, and I'm glad it's in Google Reader now!

Yet another service that requires giving up information about yourself (in this case it's which websites you read) in order to use it.

It would be much more valuable if it was a stand-alone application which did not require communicating any information to Google in order to use it.

If you're philosophically opposed to web applications why are you participating in Hacker News?

Because they're not directly making money off of me.

I used to comment on movies on IMDB until they took the information I and others submitted to their free website and went commercial, putting tons of ads up and clearly started making money off of my contributions.

I also refuse to give reviews to Amazon for similar reasons.

I'm ok with participating in non-commercial forums, as I feel they are less likely to sell information about me than sites which have gone commercial.

Also, I don't really view forums as tools for collecting information about their participants, unlike all the "free" web-services run by corporations. I suppose forums could be used for this purpose, but I think at this point it's just less likely. But it's definitely something to consider.

> I also refuse to give reviews to Amazon for similar reasons.

I could not picture myself bothered by Amazon reviews. They help decide when to and when to not buy. They also help me decide between two books on the same subject, gives me tips on another titles/authors that I didn't know, etc.

Oh, I'm not bothered by other people giving reviews on Amazon. But I wouldn't do it myself unless Amazon paid me.

Obviously you would not use this for anything you wanted to keep secret. And, how else should they help you?

Well, I don't want companies or anyone else profiling me based on what I read. So I generally try to avoid using services like this.

Amazon.com delivers product suggestions by profiling you. Google provides better search results by profiling your search history. How can this be a bad thing for you?

If I could trust them to do that and only that with the information they collect about me, maybe I wouldn't mind so much.

But, first, what they do with the information they collect about me is completely out of my control. They could sell it to someone else or to another corporation or to the/a government for all I know. And I won't even know, as they're not required to tell me about what they actually do with the information they collect about me. And even if the only thing they do now with my information is provide suggestions and improve search results for me and don't sell any of this information to others, that doesn't mean that they won't change their minds and start doing something else at a later date.

Second, and more importantly, I have a profound distrust of corporations. Knowledge is power and I don't want to allow corporations to get even more power over me (or over anyone else).

Third, I believe any information about me is information I own, and if these companies want to collect information about me or use it in any way, they should ask my permission.

If I feel that it would be a good thing for them to either collect information about me or use it to "improve search results" or make recommendations or do whatever else they propose to do with that information, then I'll give them that permission. If not, they should be forbidden by law from doing so.

But, since there are no such laws (at least not in the US, that I'm aware of) I'll just forego using their service completely. In fact, even if there were laws, I'm not sure if I'd use their service, since it would take a lot of convincing for me to believe these corporations were actually obeying the law.

Lock yourself in the basement, destroy the key.

It's amazing just how much hostility there is towards the notion of trying to keep information about yourself private.

It's not so much hostility towards privacy as strong disagreement about where to draw the line.

I took it more as true privacy is an impossibility. Any time you participate in the system there is a trail.

The fact that it runs on Google's servers doesn't make it any less valuable to me. It does give Google some valuable data, but this isn't a zero-sum game.

No, it's not a zero-sum game, but it would be a game I'd feel more comfortable playing if they didn't require me to give up this information.

Fortunately, the world of stand-alone non-spyware applications isn't quite dead yet.

Having said that, I just realized that that's what web-based services like this are analogous to: spyware.

All these web-based services, from Facebook to MySpace to Google itself, are actually web-based spyware, and people are eagerly using them.

I'd like it more if it allowed the user to define the search pattern and output template for each created feed like some services which I already use and pay for do.

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