RSSMaker is a little perl script I've been playing with for the last couple of days. Basically it creates RSS files for sites that haven't seen the light yet. Every couple of hours it fetches the site's page and parses it looking for something that looks like news. It then spits it all out as an RSS file. The files are dropped here.

So now, the next step is to build a site that can actually use them. my.userland.com is a nice idea but it feels very closed. Anyone who has looked at Internet Alchemy's entry will note that it broke when we moved to our new domain. Dave fixed it by deleting the old one and adding a new one, but something else happened and we've now got two entries. We'll fix it once and for all when the fdc domain is transferred here, with a symbolic link.

My gripes with my.userland.com go further than a little hiccup with the rss files. There's no way to edit your file once you submit it and you can't withdraw it. Also, you can't see the locations of the original RSS files (this is also very true of my.netscape.com). Now if we had a central repository of RSS files everyone could use that to build custom portals. RSSMaker is a start in that direction. Give it a URL and a regular expression and it will make a RSS file, give it the URL of an existing RSS file and it will copy it. Anyone is welcome to point to these files and use them for their own purposes. Drop us a line at alchemy@openjava.org if you're doing something cool with them or if you have any ideas for additional sites (with or without the appropriate regex!). Also if you publish your own RSS file let us know where it is so we can bring it here for everyone to share.