I have a website dedicated to a rather obscure interest of mine, and one of the things that I’ll do is take news stories I find via Google Alerts, and post links to them on the site. This is not really easy, since I know very little about HTML, and AFAIK, there’s no centralized RSS feed on the subject that I could put on the site.
I’d like to find an easy way to automate this, rather than manually editing the page, or resorting to slapping it all onto a blog page (which isn’t much easier than doing it manually on a standard web page, IME). I’m betting there’s not, or if there is, it costs too much (I’m unemployed, so anything above “Free” is out of my price range right now), but I figured I’d ask, since there could be.
The news stories don’t have to be pulled from the Google Alerts I have set up, but it does need to be as customizable as that (since as I said there doesn’t seem to be a dedicated news aggregator for the subject).
It’s going to be really hard if you have no experience with web languages (like, PHP, or some sort of server-side scripting language). Google hasn’t yet released an API for Google Alerts, so it would take some finangling to get it to work.
What kind of server are you using/how do you update your website?
Well, if I could just program it to scrape various news sites for links, using custom search terms, that would work. I didn’t expect to be able to forward a Google Alert message to the site, and have it scrape the email.
I use the bottom of the barrel package from 1and1.com for the site (MS server version), and how I update it is I rework the page in my HTML editor (kompozer), then upload it to the server.
meek, thanks, but I can rework HTML code myself (not elegantly, but its functional, and doesn’t look too horrible).
Tucker,
You might want to check out Wordpress. It is blogging software, but you can use it as a CMS system. I have set up a site for some people that have no tech skills at all. There are plugins available for it that will scrape blogs and newsfeeds for stories. There are thousands of themes available to make things look the way you want them. My site is on 1&1, with a landing page, my travel stuff, and my blog. So you don’t have to choose between your regular site or a blog set up. Or you can use the auto set up that 1&1 offers that sets up a blog in your webspace. It sets up Wordpress, so you don’t even have to do a download and ftp install.