One site whose content I was interested in was "Community & Networks Connection" - it aggregates lots of "community and collaboration software" news.
Although the site offers RSS feeds, the news in the RSS feed looks like this below - all of the articles are chunked into daily digests forcing you to click through to the site and never, ever, catching your eye.
![](https://googledrive.com/host/0Bznu7JgRtB5CeEVGci03U2twQjg/images/image_6.png)
Of course it would be possible to screen-scrape the data from the site and republish as RSS, maybe using a scripting language or the excellent ScaperWiki tool, but I really wanted something that anyone could use... in seconds.
Dapper To The Rescue
I began by visiting Dapper, a tool that lets you point and click and select which bits of a page you want to scrape. I began by clicking on the images of the news articles at the top.![](https://googledrive.com/host/0Bznu7JgRtB5CeEVGci03U2twQjg/images/image_18.png)
I could then choose to add my new RSS feed to my RSS Reader, but I actually made another Dapp that got the articles lower down the page. That now leaves me with two RSS feeds which I don't really want.
One of the "dapps" I created is here:
http://open.dapper.net/dapp-howto-use.php?dappName=CommunitiesandNetworkConnectionDapperVersion2
Yahoo Pipes To The Rescue
Yahoo Pipes is a wonderful visual tool for "piping" together different information sources and republishing it again. The pipe I created ( shown below ) looks like this and takes the two RSS feeds ( at the top ) from Dapper, joins them together ( Union ) , strips out any duplicates ( Unique ) and lastly filters out any junk posts.![](https://googledrive.com/host/0Bznu7JgRtB5CeEVGci03U2twQjg/images/image_30.png)
The RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates is here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=10c40fa02b113c58042af74deead0c1a&_render=rss
And it looks a bit like this:
![](https://googledrive.com/host/0Bznu7JgRtB5CeEVGci03U2twQjg/images/image_37.png)
After a few minutes configuring using point and click tools, I can now keep in touch with the news from the site from my news reader.
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