Sunday, April 12, 2009

Track Changes to Any Site, Without RSS: Create an RSS Feed with Feedity

Finding a new site is always fun, especially when it's actually has some use. But having to check for changes every single day isn't. You're probably thinking, "RSS feeds, idiot!" The thing is though, that not every website has one of these little things. But you don't have to worry about that anymore with Feedity. Yes, you probably have never heard of this page before and not many have, but boy can it be useful.
Say, you're a mechanic or something of the sort, and want to track anything new at GM. Naturally, you would go to GM's corporate site, and naturally, you would find that the RSS feed button is greyed out (meaning that there's no feed for those of you who don't know). Then you're thinking, "Screw this, I don't need some stupid GM site to stay on top of things." Of course, because GM is the best car manufacturer that has ever existed (better than your Toyota and Honda), you do happen to need to know what's happening at GM.
So you go over to Feedity! The first thing you'll see is a little bar where you enter the URL of the website you want to track. Therefore, you just enter your little "gm.com" after the http://.



Subsequently, you can click the preview button and quickly, Feedity will generate a preview of what will be included in your feed. Of course, you can apply any changes you might want to apply to your new feed, selecting a specific part of the GM page that you want to look at with the "Refine" section. You might want to keep track of "Current Offers", the "Help Center" or perhaps the "GM Heritage Center". You can even enter an "Advanced Refine", which allows you to select the exact HTML tags you want your new feed(ity) to track the content between- that is, if you're into that sort of stuff.
Finally, you just select a category, obviously, "Automotive", press "Get Feed" and you're pretty much done!



When you do this, they'll immediately provide you with a link that leads you to another page, which will be your generated RSS. Plus, you can subscribe to this feed using your Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Bloglines and more. And if you create a free account, you can save this feed to your account, get more frequent updates and make multiple feeds.
But don't be turned off by the "Pricing" tab; it's all a free service as long as you're not asking for a 99.5% uptime, 100 items per feed, advanced statistics and updates every half hour (if that's what you're interested in, you'll have $369 less to spend on premium auto parts).
And trust me, you'll be this enthusiastic too, once you visit this free RSS feed generator.

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