I love RSS. It is one of the best ways for websites to notify me of significant content updates. Sadly not all websites provide this where it could be of high value. This means the author is either not aware or does not desire supporting this feature and any external means to add this function is therefore an ephemeral solution. It is with this in mind that I use the FiveFilters.org Feed Creator in place of something like an emailed newsletter or repeatedly visiting a webpage.
Feed Creator is a web service that creates an RSS feed out of any HTML page. It does this by parsing the DOM using a user specified combination of contextual CSS selectors and other processing options. The processing is triggered from a GET or POST request to the FiveFilters server and the first 10 results are stored and cached for 30 minutes.
I find that this limited result is more than sufficient to relay to a feed aggregator service like Feedly to cache for a longer period so I can then consume from, at my leisure, using an RSS reader like Reeder. I assume Feedly magically triggers the Feed Creator service when it spiders through the Internet because I periodically receive new results from Feedly.
The Feed Creator page has sufficient directions to get you started but here are some example feeds that you can paste directly in your feed aggregator as a feed or go directly in your browser to play around with the feed preview in the FiveFilters.org landing page:
This is a feed based on my local government news page that grabs links in a class called “structured-list”. By default the text found in the
<a>element is used as the feed title.http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehorse.vic.gov.au%2FLatest-News.html&in_id_or_class=structured-listThis is a more explicit feed that searches Ozbargains LCD TV tags where the title or description contains 4K. The parameter item_title uses CSS Selector syntax to define the element where title information can be found.
http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ozbargain.com.au%2Ftag%2Flcd-tv&text_contains=4K&url_contains=node&item_title=.title
Final point on this topic is if you want to get tricky with those URL parameters - for example targeting specific parts of web pages and excluding some other results - then you'll need a webpage source viewer. There are perfectly fine ones that come with Safari and Firefox.