How do I make an RSS feed for Bloomberg News?

November 23, 2010 9:17 PM

I'd like to have an RSS feed for Bloomberg News, specifically for their environment reporting, that I can put into Google Reader. The problem is, Bloomberg News discontinued RSS feeds in 2006. None of the workarounds I've found are satisfactory: This one, for example, tries to use Google News, but it wouldn't really work for my purposes. (Using "environment" site:bloomberg.com as my search string wouldn't necessarily return all news items related to the environment -- a story just about renewable energy, for example, not its environmental benefits, wouldn't show up at all.) There's also Feedity, but they want you to pay to have feeds with any sort of functionality, which I'd rather not do if I don't have to. Page2RSS is closer to the mark, but the output is messy (multiple stories in the same feed item). Businessweek.com, which is owned by Bloomberg News, offers RSS feeds with Bloomberg News, but they don't allow for narrowing down on just the environment reporting. Is there a solution out there that's better?

Please note that I'm not trying to steal content: I'm not looking to get a full-text feed, and in fact I'd be happy with just the headlines. And Bloomberg News is freely available anyway. I just want to aggregate news items from Bloomberg the way I can from virtually every other news site.

posted by Cash4Lead to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

General feed (xml version). Not environment specific. Via.
posted by christopherious at 9:36 PM on November 23, 2010

Best answer: It looks like Feed43 should be able to do this. Depending on the mark-up, you might only get the items in the top section or the bottom section with one Feed43 feed, but then you could get all the items with two Feed43 feeds.

Of course, you might also consider replacing Bloomberg as a source with NYT or a relevant blogs. The coverage is probably better.
posted by stuart_s at 8:57 AM on November 24, 2010

Best answer: Here's a feed with the headlines for the items in the upper section. The lower section should be just as easy. Getting them in one feed from Feed43 is probably a lot harder than either merging the two with another service or just subscribing to two different feeds.
posted by stuart_s at 9:11 AM on November 24, 2010

Response by poster: stuart_s: Thanks for the link to Feed43, I think that will work -- though it may take some effort to set up.

Bloomberg actually does a better job than the NYT, typically, in reporting on the really granular stuff happening in green tech, which is directly relevant to my line of work. So that's why I'm bothering to get an RSS feed for them.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:40 AM on November 24, 2010