sances.info

Update 2: Webcron seems to be back up, but in the meantime I upgraded my hosting package to allow Cron jobs. Instructions posted soon.

Update: Webcron.org is apparently down, which messes things up a bit. Currently looking for alternatives. Feeds won't work until then. Check back soon.

For a few years now, I've enjoyed being able to read all my news for free, delivered to me daily via the magic of RSS. It saves paper, and it saves me 300-500 dollars a year on a print edition subscription. One thing that has continued to bother me, however, is the lack of any feed for the front page image of the papers whose RSS feeds I subscribe to. Sure, the Boston Globe, for example, has an RSS feed for the articles that appeared on the front page for a given day, but what good is that to me when it's mixed in with 20 other feeds, all sorted by date or in alphabetical order? I read newspapers, as opposed to blogs or nytimes.com at a random time, because I like to know what other people are reading--know your enemy--and also because what's on the front page of the New York Times continues to determine what leads the evening newscast. This shared experience is lost with RSS.

The papers I read do provide a designated page on their websites where they display a scan of the front page (e.g. the Globe), as does the Newseum website. How hard would it be for them to stick this image into an RSS feed for public consumption?

Because I don't have the patience to bookmark these various front page URL's and read around a bunch of ads, I decided to take the initiative and build a robot that will do this for me, snipping the images daily and delivering them to me via RSS. (Of course by robot, I mean a PHP script.) I had never written an RSS feed before, let alone created one that scrapes a daiy image from an external site, so I'm pretty pleased with the final product.

In the coming weeks I'll explain more how this is done, for anyone who is interested. For now, here are the feeds!

Boston Globe: http://sances.info/dev/globefeed.php
NY Times: http://sances.info/dev/nytfeed.php
Washington Post: http://sances.info/dev/wpfeed.php