Aurlog

Big Brother RSS feed yet again again

A little late as the final is this Friday, but I ought to mention that I noticed a week or two ago that the Big Brother site now has an RSS feed, part of a family of Channel 4 RSS feeds. The feed looks to be exactly the same (in output, I haven't checked the XML code) as mine except that a picture is added, something that I was loath to do anyway, thinking that republishing pictures is one step too many beyond screenscraping.

The other major difference is that the official feed already has 28 subscribers, on Bloglines anyway, despite its relative youth compared to the 2 subscribers (including myself, goodness knows who the other person was) that I generated.

I have to say I am actually quite vague about what happened in Big Brother this year as I have so many feeds set up in Bloglines that I have to filter my way through the same thing happening three or four times, on my feed, on Channel 4's, and on the Sun's feed (15 subscribers), which is independent as to content and is in many ways better than the official news. Next year should be easier.

A.D. XIX KAL. SEPT. MMVI

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Big Brother RSS feed yet again

Big Brother are apparently introducing RSS feeds amongst other changes. Hurrah: I shall see what it looks like. In the meantime, try mine. Incidentally, in the comments to the last article, David Holtz suggested using FeedFire. I couldn't get any satisfactory results with it myself as the feed David had set up confined itself to headlines and, more importantly, the site needed payment as far as I could tell in order to do even the most rudimentary configuration.

Getting back to Big Brother, it does seem odd timing to introduce such changes to their site. I can't believe my own comments have had that much impact, but I do notice that even the Sun is offering a Big Brother RSS news feed, though not of course matching the news as delivered by Big Brother.

On a related note, I came across the Radio Times Big Brother Blog (via Jack Mottram), which is worth a read, though mostly opinion rather than news as such.

A.D. III KAL. IUL. MMVI

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Big Brother 2006 RSS feed that actually works

The Big Brother rss feed I created with Feed43 didn't work. Although the feed seemed OK if you went and checked it, and although it presented very nicely when it did work, it never seemed to update on Bloglines, giving an error signal for days on end before spluttering into life again. No good and it seems I am not alone. I experimented with a few other screen-scraping feed creators:

I therefore had a go at doing it myself using PHP and a couple of regular expressions, and managed to make a feed identical (in output if not in XML coding) to the Feed43 one. And it works. Feed: http://www.aurochs.org/internet/blogging/bb.php. After doing this I wonder whether Feed43 will really have a market as the sort of people who can make sense of terms like 'whitespace' and symbols like {*}, {_}, and {%} will probably be OK doing their own exactly as they want it with a little code and a regular expression.

KAL. IUN. MMVI

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Big Brother 2006 rss feed

As a follower of Big Brother I am always disappointed that they don't have an rss feed for their news. So, I decided to use Feed43 which screenscrapes websites to provide feeds, with a little setting up. I configured a feed which you can find at http://feed43.com/bigbrother.xml. I have subscribed to it on Bloglines and will see how it goes over the next few days.

A.D. VII KAL. IUN. MMVI

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Tom