How to get feeds for sites that do not have RSS feeds or customize existing site feeds.

I love the Google reader and I subscribe to all my favourite websites through RSS feeds. However, some sites do not offer full feed function and I often just get a preview of the content in my reader. For example a website may not offer images in its feed and it may be annoying to click through to get its full content. Worse still some websites dont have an RSS feed. How do you get RSS feeds from a site that doesnt offer RSS feeds? I was looking for a solution and found Dapper.

Using Dapper you can make feeds for feedless web sites or customise existing feeds. It may be a little confusing at first but they offer step by step instructions and tutorials as you go along.

But heres a few of mine to help you get started.

1. First click on create a new dapp link at the bottom of the search box.

2.  Paste the address of the website whose feed you want. Either use an existing feed or start with the website itself. You can choose the Dapp XML to start with.

when  you click “Next”, the Dapp engine finds and loads your site.

3. now, instead of loading the home page, click on a post to get the page for that individual post. When that loads, click “add to basket”.

Now, go back to the home page using the green arrows next to the URL and click on another post and load that to the basket. Repeat that for a few pages. What we are trying to do is add many representative pages for the engine to find similarities.

4. In the next step, the engine analyses your pages and finds similar bocks such as titles, images, posts, ads etc.

Now as you move the cursor over the page you will see boxes, select a box and allot a name to it. If you select title, the engine will recognize the same thing in all the pages you added. Similarly you can add images  and text. Include only the content you will need to receive in your final feed.

5. In the next step, you need to group all the above step. For instance, in my feed title, image and text compose a single feed, so I group them as a post. As you select groups, u get an instant preview of what the resulting feed will look like.

 

6. Save your Dapp . You have the option of making it private.

Once saved, you get the result as a Dapp feed. You then have the option to convert it as any type of RSS or Atom feed;

which then gives you an option to choose what to put as your feed title and what to put in the feed text and previews the feed. It also gives you the feed address:

which you can then add to your feede reader to get the customised feed:

In my case I have successfully customised my feed to include pictures where the original feed came without images or detailed text.