I’ve always been an open source fan and for the past 2 or 3 years I’ve been working with JBoss products - lately JBoss Portal. So, I decided I want to become more active in the JBoss Portal forums on JBoss.com - unfortunately, though, their forums aren’t RSS-enabled and I’m a big RSS user.
So, I decided to use one of my favorite, free web-tools - Yahoo Pipes - to build an RSS feed for the JBoss.com forums.
In short, the pipe does the following:
- uses a URL Builder object to “scrape” the jboss.com forum site
- passes in a parameter of the forum ID to read (ie: 215 for the Portal User’s forum, 205 for the Portal design forum)
- uses regular expressions to slice and dice the fetched page into an aggregated RSS feed
Because the forum ID is a parameter, you can add any JBoss.com forum to your RSS client of choice. The feed results aren’t perfect (eg: doesn’t get the original post date right), but it does the trick for my needs.
So check out the JBoss.com Forum Feeds Pipe at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pembertonandy/jbossforums
Feel free to clone the pipe and use it to your liking; the same technique can be used on any publicly available site. Let me know if you like it!
on Mar 11th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Hi Andy,
I was wondering if it’s possible for a novice website builder to build a similar pipe to this for a different forum?
I get some of what you’ve constructed by looking at you pipe set-up. But the url builder and some of the other particulars are foreign to me.
Should I get a handle on some other things before tackling this?
on Mar 11th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Sure, Jeff. This technique could work w/any other site, though I think since JBoss switched their forums over to another CMS system, the Pipe I developed may no longer work.