Dapper Helps Create RSS Feeds for Sites That Don't Have Them

The act of running RSS on a website is called "feeding," and the act of displaying a feed on another website (or phone or PDA or whatever) is called "leeching."

All content management systems worth the name allow users to easily feed their own content to the web, and leech other feeds onto their site. Especially Drupal, the content management system that we favor here at Prometheus Labor Communications. All 100+ sites that we've built for the labor movement run on Drupal and all have feeding and leeching built right in.

However, there are some sites that you might conceivably want to leech onto your shiny new labor website - hopefully built by us - that doesn't want to let you do it. Say, for example, some key corporate or government site for a unit that you're running an organizing drive at.

But they just don't seem interested in making it easy to track their latest public updates - forcing you to spend lots of valuable organizing time going directly and tediously to their web site day after day. Just think of all the workers you could be talking to instead ...

So what to do?

Well, you could hire an "Executive Website Looker-Upper" to take over such tedious duties for you, or choose the new and much cheaper option ... try Dapper.

Dapper is a web-based service at www.dapper.net that allows you to create an RSS feed for websites that don't offer RSS feed - thus allowing you to follow them wherever you keep track of RSS feeds (in a plugin for your browser like the Wizz for Firefox plugin that I use, in a web-based service like Google Reader, in Live Bookmarks in your browser, or through a standalone RSS reader program).

The service is fairly easy to use. Just register for a free user account, find a web page you'd like to create an RSS feed for, and go through the 5 step process - in which Dapper breaks up the target web page into chunks, let's you separate titles, body text and links, group them and pump them out as a feed.

At the end of the process you are provided with a working RSS feed for the site, and you're good to go.

We tried Dapper out and found that it worked pretty well, however if you're not careful you can end up with some blank links in your new feed, or have links that don't show up because they require special software for end users to view. But for basic text based sites the system works rather well, and we recommend it.

Check it out and let us know what you think.