TODAYonline News Alert Full RSS Feed
As featured on TODAY (June 28, 2006):
“TODAY: TODAY hacked, it’s on your phone”
Since it was Yahoo! Hack Day a few days ago, I’ve also decided to take a day off my normal work to do some of codings for fun.
Here is what I come up with, a full article RSS feed for the free Singapore newspaper, TODAY.
The feeds are here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/todayonline
(For main news)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/todayonlinesup
(For supplementary sections)
[See updates below for more information on the difference]
I have been subscribing to TODAYonline’s full text email news alert for over a year now. It has always been promptly delivered to my mailbox at around 7am everyday (except Sunday) and had been enjoying reading the free ‘e-paper’ for that period of time. However, I would have some problem reading it when I had to travel that morning. Since I own a Palm, I guess it would be useful if I could have it synced with Avantgo so I could have the full paper of TODAY for the particular day while I am traveling on MRT or buses. As much as I wanted to have the full feed, I found out that TODAY doesn’t provide such service, not even a partial feed.
So, I got down and make a script, that automatically parses the full text news alert and make it into a full text RSS feed. Since I think it benefits me and might also benefit some other people who, like me, have a problem grabbing a physical copy of TODAY every morning, I’m sharing this feed with you.
If you’re going to use the feed, please keep in mind to set the update frequency to some where around 12 hours or 24 hours, preferably only check at around 7:30am or 8am (in case the newsletter comes in late) everyday. This is due to the fact that as the feed is providing the whole complete newspaper in full text, the feed could get quite large and would consume a lot of unnecessary bandwidth if the feed is being fetched at a relatively short interval as there wouldn’t be any changes for the rest of the day. The feed would only be updated once everyday at around 7:30am - 8am SGT
Please also note that this is only a small for-fun project by me. I am not gaining any benefit from this, except probably saving me some money from going to Zouk last weekend. In fact, it is going to take up precious bandwidth from my hosting account.
By offering this feed, I am in no way claiming the ownership of the content in the feed. It is the property and copyright of Mediacorp Press Ltd. I am also not trying to compete with them by providing this feed. If Mediacorp Press Ltd thinks that the feed should not be here, I would take it down, of course with the hope that they would themselves provide such feed as it would get me a few more hours of extra sleep time by not needing to fight for a physical copy early in the morning.
Tips:
- Read the feed in reverse chronological order (or in the way it is originally presented) for the original intended order of the articles in the email received.
Updates:
23 June 2006
3 sections are removed from the full feed - Supplements, Voices and Plus.(Please see below for further updates)- This is to reduce the feed’s size as sometimes the feed size would grow past the size limit of feedburner’s parser just as what has happened today.
- Sorry for the inconvenience. Please read these sections from TODAYonline or grab a print copy yourself. However, if there’s demand, I would try to make a separate feed for these secions though currently I don’t see the need to as this feed is here to help those constantly on the move to read important news on mobile devices and not to replace TODAYonline.
29 June 2006
- Due to demand, I have created another feed for supplementary sections on TODAY. The new feed is located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/todayonlinesup.
- From now on, the main feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/todayonline) would cover news from these categories ‘Hot News’, ‘Business’, ‘World News’, ‘Sports’, and ‘Singapore News’.
- The supplementary feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/todayonlinesup) would cover news from other categories not covered by the main feed.