I wanted to list the items that I had for sale on Google Base on the front page of the site. Knowing already that Google offered RSS feeds for many other services they offer, I checked the list that displays only my items. I was sad to see there wasn't any syndication links.
Perturbed by this obstacle, I was determined to discover a way to do this. I immediately began thinking how I could program it myself. Once I realized the complications of doing so I decided against it. Then I remembered a post that I had seen about a website that converted any website with news items or repeating regions into a news feed xml file. This is of course for sites without a syndication file.
The site is called Feed 43. The way it works is you input the URL of the page that you want to extract the news items from (can by any repeating region, not just news). After it fetches the page, it shows you the source of the webpage in a textbox. It then gives you a set of simple rules on how to parse the information you need for your feed, such as title, link and description of each item. Once you understand how the rules work, you can have it test the rules which will tell you how many items it found and what the text values are for each of the attributes. I am not going to go into too much detail about how the rules work. The ruleset I used to create my syndication file, which should work for any Google Base list is:
Global search value:
{%}
Item (repeatable) Search Pattern:
<p class=g>{*}
href="{%}"{*}
>{%}</a>{*}
<font size=-1>{%}<b>
Finally, once you have tweaked it the way you want, you tell it which rule applies to which attribute and hit Preview. It will show you a preview of your XML file as it may appear in an RSS reader.
From there, I now had an XML file to work with for use in ColdFusion and formatting it for my page.
