Let’s say I want to be an informed, engaged local citizen. Let’s say my town has a website set up where they post local updates and alerts that I might care about.
Specifically, let’s say there was a water main break a few days ago that led to everyone in the town being asked to boil water, and that I wanted to know when that boil advisory was over.
Sure, the information is right there on their website, so one option is to just reload the website all day and wait for an alert to pop up:
But what if my goal and wish is to have access to that information in a programmatic way? Such as, say, RSS, the technology that has long allowed websites to share information with each other in a format that other websites and software can read?
Once I have that, I could read the alert in a news reader, I could have it piped to a Slack or Discord channel, I could make a little notification appear on my computer desktop, make the lights flash using IFTTT or Zapier, or whatever was most useful to me. The steps would be:
- Get RSS feed link.
- Do whatever I want to with the information in the feed.
But this town does not offer an RSS feed on its website. Not for alerts, not for regular community news, nothing. (To make matters worse, it’s powered by web software that appears aimed at helping smaller towns and cities have a web presence, so we know this missing feature is now being repeated in communities across the world!)
What are my other options?
Continue reading An example of why RSS is useful and important