Web app immedi.at takes a RSS or Atom feed specified by the user (selected via a small bookmarklet) and then sends alerts to the IM application of your choice when the feed is updated. Currently AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber and ICQ are supported.
At first glance, the idea is awesome, although it might get a little bit overkill with some more popular sites – say Slashdot or BBC News, but it does do exactly what it says on the tin.
However, the killer app might just be a combining it with a keyword based feed such as my earlier Yahoo! News over RSS article, alerting you to stories from multiple sources based on topics of your choice.
Currently the service appears to pick up its feeds via autodetecting the URL’s in the selected site’s meta tags, but with a little tweaking it might not be too difficult to point it in the direction of a XML file. (The system is very much in beta right now, so the functionality might well appear in the coming weeks nonetheless.)
Well, like a dork, I didn’t actually realise that Yahoo! News already offered up the whole RSS feeds for news keywords thing when I started. However, the fun thing of course with the API that Yahoo! are offering is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to create another script that dishes out the same thing in another ‘rival’ syndication format:
Atom enabled Yahoo! web feeds examples
The syntax of the URL is almost identical to that of the RSS feed http://undercrank.com/yahoo/atom/news/«keywords» (the equivalent RSS version would be http://undercrank.com/yahoo/rss/news/«keywords». This is a slight change to the previous syntax posted, but the old format is still perfectly valid and won’t break for those already using it.
As before, the feed validates nicely has good friendly HTTP caching facilities built in, as as a special bonus it conforms to the Tag URI recommendations pretty well too.
Use is made of the extended Author tags for each article, and support for multiple languages for each entry is available – although it appears that Yahoo! returns “en” as the language for everything, even, if it’s not.
Finally, I’ll post up the source once I’m convinced I’m doing everything the ‘right’ way.
Excited by the prospect of a reasonably usable search API being made available by Yahoo!, I’ve put together a small project that will create an dynamic RSS 2.0 feed based on the Yahoo! News Search hooks.
The feed validates nicely, and also deals well with the tests created by Unpolluted; it has GZip handling, HTTP Expires, Last-Modified, ETag and If-None-Match support built-in.
The usage is very simple – point your aggregator of choice at http://undercrank.com/yahoo/rss/news/KEYWORD, replacing KEYWORD with your appropriate search term. Some examples are given below:
I’ll release the source when I’ve tidied it up a bit so you can host it on your own boxes, but feel free to try it here for the time being.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but My Yahoo! now supports RSS and Atom feeds. This is mostly of note in the UK if you’ve been moved over to the new BT Yahoo! service from BT Openworld – the default home page for subscribers is a super-duper glossy version of the same service.
