Sat, 03 Mar 2007
When playing with
Yahoo Pipes the other day, I mentioned that it would be nice if it had a
screen-scraping module to build feeds for pages that don't one. It turns out
there are a handful of services that already do that. I used Feedity to create of feed
of the Prudent Bear news since my script stopped working at
some point.
This morning I decided to update my Amazon aStore since they now allow you to add more than
just the nine items on the homepage. I wanted to add a bunch of stuff from my
wishlist. So I decided to try to get a list of ASINs for the items in my
wishlist using Yahoo Pipes. Amazon provides RSS
feeds of wishlists, but they only contain the last 10 items, so I used Ponyfish to create a
screen-scraped feed.
(I triggered an application error trying to do so with Feedity.)
Then I used Yahoo Pipes rename module to change the title of each item to the
link, and the regex module to change the title to ASIN by extracting it from
the URL. This gives me a feed
of ASIN's. Admittedly, this is quite a convoluted solution to the actual
problem I was trying to solve; curl and sed would have worked fine in this
instance. It gave me a chance to play around with Yahoo Pipes, though.
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