Thursday, July 5, 2007

New books RSS feeds

Many thanks to the Wyoming State Library for posting the URL format for Sirsi catalogs. Using this information, I was able to create RSS feeds via Feed43 for both new books and new movies. Since the feeds are captured from the HTML created by the catalog, I have to create links into the record using a keyword search pulled from the titles, so it isn't perfect, but it works 90% of the time.

Feed43 lets you customize which parts of the HTML you want in the RSS feed, and even gives you the ability to format and move these strings. Since the catalog is pretty "goopy," this functionality was essential. The other "easy-to-use, put-in-a-URL and we'll-create-the-feed" sites just didn't know how to deal with the chaos that is the catalog output.

Now to format the feed to put on the website...

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