Hey guys! I discovered two feed proxies.

  1. http://www.netvibes.com/proxy/feedProxy.php?test=1&url=__FEED_URL__
  2. http://my.live.com/cfw/news.aspx?fetchurl=__FEED_URL__

Replace the __FEED_URL__ with the feed URL of your choice. Of the two feed proxies above, I like Netvibe’s proxy as the best because of the following reasons:

  1. Feed output is JSON. This means that, netvibes has done all the necessary work to convert feeds of any type (RSS, ATOM, RDF etc.) into JSON.
  2. If you are writing a script to examine feeds from various sites, you have only one data structure to deal with 😉
  3. Almost all programming languages support JSON. Refer to www.json.org for JSON libraries available for various programming languages.
  4. JSON by itself is very lightweight and eliminates most of the overhead of XML, thereby preserving bandwidth.
  5. A simple program in VB.NET to parse a JSON structure and get the required feed data in a Dictionary datatype is only about 9 lines of code. In Ruby, it will be even lesser. Compare the same with XML output. Even though feed parsers are available, you have to create your own wrapper above everything to get everything to work out properly. Reuse what you already have (DRY Principle). Netvibes has already done the bull work to convert all kinds of feeds into a common format.
  6. Best of all, no authentication is necessary to access these links 😀

Live.com’s feed proxy returns the actual feed output. So, if the feed you are referring to gives RSS output, this proxy returns that. The same happens with ATOM, RDF etc. Keep watching this space. I will update the post with other feed proxy URLs that I encounter. If you go across any, please mention them in the comments section.

 

One Response to “RSS Feed Proxy – Finally one data format to parse all feeds”

  1. Bookmarks about Authentication Says:

    […] – bookmarked by 4 members originally found by Melissa866 on 2008-12-07 RSS Feed Proxy – Finally one data format to parse all feeds http://www.aswinanand.com/blog/2008/07/rss-feed-proxy/ – bookmarked by 5 members originally found […]