Feed43 - Create a RSS Feed

This came through my del.icio.us feeds today; Feed43 is a "free online service converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly." More from the site:

"Feed43 (pronounced as Feed For Free) is an online service, a proxy between your news reader application and third-party web sites that don't support RSS natively. It allows you to create your own news feeds in RSS format for any web site, that is to monitor any web site from within news reader."

There's only a few sites that I've come across lately that actually don't have an RSS feed; by the way, if you're using Firefox, every time you navigate to a web site that has an RSS feed, you should see a small orange square in the bottom right hand corner of your browser window. That tells you that you can subscribe to that site's RSS feed, via a feed reader such as Bloglines or within Firefox itself with Live Bookmarks.

So I tested Feed43 out with this site: Learn to Knit and Crochet. I already know how to crochet but I'd love to learn how to knit, and this site, while frequently updated, does not have an RSS feed.

• Step 1: Agree to Feed43's terms of service.
• Step 2: Enter in site address, then hit "reload" to go to next step. The "reload" terminology is confusing; I would suggest something like "launch" or "go speed racer" or something more intuitive.
• Step 3: Set up extraction rules. Uhhhh....yeah, ok. I'm supposed to define a global and repeatable search pattern? This is where Feed43 lost me, even with the help menu.

This seems like a good service but I couldn't get it to work; perhaps because it's a lazy Sunday, perhaps because I'm too sleepy to figure out what the &$%* a "global search pattern" is, who knows. For Feed43 to really take off beyond the geek set, the powers that be might want to think about making it a bit more user friendly.

More About RSS: RSS is just a way to subscribe to Web content. Think of it as a newspaper subscription - your newspaper comes to you at YOUR house, instead of you going downtown and bugging the editors. Find out what RSS is, turn any RSS feed into audio with Audiolicious, and find how RSS and search engine optimization work together.

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