My go-to tool for sites without rss is http://feed43.com which I find easy to set up. Also important to point out that it plays nice with the sites it scrapes.
Example... Problem: I love lurking in ask.metafilter but only want to see threads that have a "best answer" marked. No official feed for that.
I'm also a huge fan of feed43 but I've managed to hit my head more than a few times on its limitations. Coincidentally just this weekend I wrote a teeny program as a replacement for feed43. I've got all my scrapers working with XPath (which I prefer for this situation) but it's very straightforward to add a new site. https://github.com/dgilman/atom_maker
so you're saying you're incapable or just too lazy to write your own "rss". the second s is for simple. you have all the tools you need in any base unix installation to automate this. it would take you minutes to do.
perhaps this is precisely the point of the recovering programmer comment. there is a reluctance to doing anything for oneself. fear of implementing something for yourself, your own way, because someone else has implemented it their way, placed it in a repository and it's managed to gain a following of users.
god bless the people who still enjoy diy and writing negative code.
Jesus, kid, you created an account 5 hours ago and already have -16 karma.
Get a grip, do not insult people unless you have a pretty good argument (and even then try not to), don't assume you're smarter, don't assume you're more hardcore or hard working, don't reply unless you've got something worthwhile to say and just be nice in general.
And implementing your own script that fetches content from the web and compiles a RSS feed is nice and all that, but you cannot make a generic crawler unless you want your feed filled with junk, so you'll have to customize it for each website in particular ... and why bother?
I mean, it's a privilege for a website to be read by me, the reader and this relationship rarely works both ways. And for valuable content that I might miss, that's why I'm still on Hacker News.
