Singletrackworld is a popular UK website with mountain biking related news, and very active forums. Unfortunately the site is packed with images, flash, javascript, inline styles and adverts, and the forums are full of interesting people. However it is a good source of information and it is quite good to find out what other people are doing, cheap stuff for sale etc.
The main discussion forum list page weighs in at around 80Kb HTML only. Then you have the 40 or so actual posts that stem off from this. The classifieds forum is about the same size.
Previously I wrote a greasemonkey script for Firefox that changes the site to be nicer on the eyes and hides most of the crappy adverts etc.
I decided to create an RSS feed of the forums at the weekend because I was so bored of waiting for the forums to load due to the page size, hidden adverts and site problems.
General Discussion RSS 2.0 Feed
Classifieds RSS 2.0 Feed
These feeds are about 150Kb each and have the entire threads (until the articles disappear from the front page of the forum).
hi sandy,
Thanks for the RSS feeds - brill - I’m interested in how you did this, can you give me any pointers?
Cheers
Jim
Comment by james — April 3, 2007 @ 3:15 pm
Hi Jim,
I work as a Web Developer / System Administrator for a living so tend to spend most of my time looking at code. I was fed up with STW being slow etc and decided to spend a few hours writing some code in perl to create a feed.
In short the way it works is:
Get list of forum topics (Most recent 30 or so)
Fetch the content of each topic
Fix the content to make it a bit more readable
Build the Feed
Upload the Feed to my Webspace
The above is done periodically twice an hour.
Comment by Sandy Thomson — April 3, 2007 @ 3:47 pm