help me "subscribe" to websites that do not use RSS with Firefox.

April 20, 2007 8:01 AM

help me "subscribe" to websites that do not use RSS with Firefox.

I remember in the days of IE 5 on the mac there was a feature to "subscribe" to a website. This method did not use RSS. I think it simply checked for a change in the html of the page every N minutes. I use a lot of websites that do not utilize rss and I hate having to go through my bookmarks one by one to see if anything has been updated. Is there a plugin that emulates the IE 5 functionality? Ideally in the native Firefox bookmark menu.

posted by Infernarl to computers & internet (7 answers total)

This is not exactly the answer you're looking for, but I've used feed43.com to create rss feeds for websites that don't have their own. It works great - although the paid version ($30/year) is more reliable than the free version (which tended to time out often).
posted by wearyaswater at 9:11 AM on April 20, 2007

FeedYes.com (From Lifehacker)

Also, Ponyfish.
posted by desjardins at 9:26 AM on April 20, 2007

Here are a few screen scraping tools that will generate RSS and may help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_feeds#Scraping
posted by chrisamiller at 10:18 AM on April 20, 2007

I believe Ryan North's RSSpect works along these lines.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:27 AM on April 20, 2007

I second feed43 like weary says. I use it for all the non-rssified sites on my watch list, and it works great.
posted by gemmy at 3:11 PM on April 20, 2007

Update Scanner, perhaps?
posted by anaelith at 3:34 PM on April 20, 2007

ChangeDetection.com.
posted by softlord at 3:38 PM on April 20, 2007