Technology Blog

So, now that I’m back in Dublin, I’ve taken a quick look around for ways to
keep up to date on upcoming live gigs — and found that the situation, frankly,
sucks. In particular, almost none of the sites are offering RSS or Atom feeds
yet.

Having said that, Waxy and
Leonard’s Upcoming.org is
doing quite nicely for the Dublin metro
area:

• Upcoming.org: Dublin Events

And lots of credit for the promoter, MCD, who seem to be just
about the only Irish listings site who offer RSS:

• MCD.ie News and Events

This is fantastic, but — naturally — they don’t cover events put on by their
competitors.

Apart from that, it’s pretty shoddy. Lots of late-90’s-looking
websites out there, and no feeds in sight. Thankfully, Feed43, and some perl scripting, is on hand to
allow me to take matters into my own hands.

Entertainment Ireland offer a pretty good music news
section — but sans feed. Feed43
saves the day:

• Entertainment Ireland: Music News

And, surprisingly, Ticketmaster, of all sites, is turning out to be a great
way to find out what’s on in Dublin, listing pretty much all ticketed events in
a nice, clean, succinct format. Unfortunately, the highest location resolution
it offers for Ireland is the country as a whole.
However, this can be worked around by subscribing to
individual venues, such as
Crawdaddy
or The Village. (This has a happy
side-effect of narrowing down the types of music — I can skip finding
out that The
Eagles are playing, since they won’t be playing at Crawdaddy

For some reason, though, Ticketmaster haven’t got around to offering their own
RSS feeds. Not a problem — in response I’ve hacked up tm2rss.cgi, a
little script which scrapes the venue pages and produces RSS:

• Ticketmaster: events at The Village
• Ticketmaster: events at Crawdaddy

For other venues, simply take the venue URL (for example,
http://www.ticketmaster.ie/venue/198641 for The Village), add the numeric
venue ID in place of NNNNN in this URL:
http://taint.org/scraped/tm2rss.cgi?v=NNNNN , then use that as the Feed URL in
your feed reader.

atom dublin events feeds gigs ireland listings live music rss syndication

This post was written by Justin, source: RSS Feeds for Events in Dublin

I’ve just given Feed43 a go. It’s very nifty.

Basically, it’s a pattern-based HTML-to-RSS scraper — similar to my own
Sitescooper in that respect — but built entirely
as a web app.

Until now, I’ve been hacking up scrapers one by one, using either
Sitescooper or WWW::Mechanize, run from cron, and
putting the output up on taint.org; for example, http://taint.org/scraped/ has
the public ones: Threadless, Perry Bible Fellowship, and White Ninja comics.

Today, I came across a case where I wanted a new RSS feed, and since I’d been
hearing of Feed43, thought I’d give it a try, to save running yet another cron
on our server. It was reasonably simple, although still required a fair bit
of knowledge of the concepts of scraping via pattern matching against HTML; but
the UI was fantastic, with everything previewed using a clean AJAX UI, and
within 3 minutes I had a new feed.

For the curious — the feed was for TCAL’s Ireland category , and the results are here: Feed43 (Feed For Free) : TCAL - Ireland. (go ahead
and sign up if you like

New web pattern, by the way — there’s a trend towards using “secret URLs”
instead of username/password authentication for the kind of “trivial” auth
task, like editing feed-scraper details. Good idea.

feed43 feeds html rss scraping syndication

This post was written by Justin, source: Feed43 Rocks