CheeseGrater

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[ 2004-May-14 10:04 ]

CheeseGrater is a "screen scraper" that creates RSS feeds for sites that don't have one. It is based on a script originally written by Jamie Zawinski. I hacked it to run as a CGI script, so it will generate the RSS feeds on demand. You can check out the Cheesegrater CGI running on my web server. Feel free to subscribe to these RSS feeds in your favourite news aggregator. Updated: Fixed a problem with the Radio Canada feed.

For the hard core geeks, the source code is available. This version only requires Perl and a web server capable of running CGI scripts. I replaced the calls to wget with a pure Perl HTTP 1.1 client. This is stupid, but my web server doesn't have much installed on it. I've added support for If-Modified-Since to make it skip the conversion if the page has not been updated, and gzip content encoding, so it will use less bandwidth.