Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Friday, June 24, 2005

RSS Scraper and Feed Generator For Your Web Site: MetaCentric

"Many people visit your Web site once and never return. Like a holiday romance, it's nice while it lasts but a poor return on your Internet investment. RSS news feeds stretch your Web site out over time and help build a long term relationship with the people that use your site."

Metacentric_logo.gif

Metacentric provides a scraper service that transforms standard HTML into RSS 1.0 using XSL transformation.

MetaCentric processes any Dublin Core metadata in the source according to the DC in HTML recommendation. HTML input is passed through JTidy to convert to XHTML, and is validated against a "lax" DTD, so the system tolerates a range of non-standard markups.

 

 

The two main processing modes of MetaCentric select links or fragment anchors in the document to form news items, so the service does not require any special template-style markup. The anchor content is used for the item title and adjacent block level content for the description.

All processing is conducted remotely, so requires no scripts, databases or special software on your Web site.

The system caches the transformation result according to any HTTP expires header for the source HTML, or for one day if none is present.

Customers can force a refresh for urgent changes through the Metacentric Web site, create copy-and-paste markup for link buttons and auto-discovery links.

MetaCentric takes also an innovative and unique approach to guarantee that its RSS scraping service is used only by legal owners of web sites and not by others.

To this end MetaCentric sends out to you a token which you need to embed into a text file to be placed on the server where your web site files are hosted. Once you have done this Metacentric is certain that you have sufficient access to the site files to be an authorized requester of an automated RSS feed.

The Metacentric service also includes a Javascript include feed, for easy syndication with other Web sites, and a pure RDF metadata feed.

Costs

Metacentric prices are based on the number of service requests for the RSS feeds you publish.

Unfortunately all prices are in British Pounds (GBP), though you can pay in your own preferred currency via PayPal.

Zero rate Up to 1 £0.00
Band 1 Up to 500 £21.00
Band 2 Up to 1000 £36.00
Band 3 Up to 2000 £60.00
Band 4 Up to 4000 £99.00

MetaCentric provides access to a daily statement of service charges and Web server logs to monitor your channel use and billing.

Metacentric also provides summary statistics on the use of your feeds in the form of Web server logs that include the number of requests made and the number of different computers requesting your feeds.

Free to try.

 
 
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posted by Robin Good on Friday, June 24 2005, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015

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