This morning, I set out to implement a whole bunch of great suggestions from the book The Web Startup Success Guide by Bob Walsh. Even though EstiMate is a long-established Internet business, I’m always looking for valuable information about how to improve our relationship with customers and our web presence. For any of you taking your business to the web, I can’t recommend this book more highly. Even though it’s based on starting up a software business, it’s chock-full of ideas that will help any business move to the next level online. Especially in the area of social media, such as Facebook, twitter, and other social media services, it really shines.

Anyway, I digress. This post is really about RSS feeds.

My goal was to add all kinds of RSS feeds to my iGoogle homepage.  I thought it would be cool to create a new tab filled with feeds from all of the sign industry discussion groups such as Signs101.com, Letterville, the SignIndustry.com message boards, Creative Signmakers of America, the US Cutter forums, etc., so that  I could easily see what’s going on in the industry with a sort of radar-like approach  every morning and participate in relevant discussions. Boy, was I surprised to discover how difficult this really is. Naïvely, I thought I’d be able to go to each board, grab the RSS feed, and add it to my homepage.

Did you realize how many words don’t publish RSS feeds? I find it hard to believe that I’m the only one in the sign industry who wants to grab RSS feeds from discussion forums.

So here’s what I did. I searched Google for utilities to convert webpages to RSS feeds, and found several alternatives out there. The first one I tried was Page2RSS.com, but it’s default extraction didn’t work for any of the sites I was trying to extract from.  Then I tried Feed43.com, which offers greater control over extraction, but I found their extraction rules to be like rocket science to implement. Finally, I found FeedYes.com and Feedity.com, both of which offer free and paid plans for creating RSS feeds.

I found, however, that both sites limit the refresh rate of your RSS feeds based on which level of subscription you have. Since I’m still experimenting, I didn’t want to pay to thoroughly test the technology. So I kept digging.

Finally I struck gold!  Dapp Factory is a service published by Dapper.net, which offers exactly what I’m looking for –  the ability to create an unlimited number of RSS feeds, including my login credentials to the relative site, and then republish them on my homepage or anywhere else I want to aggregate them. Dapper’s interface is very easy to use, with a point-and-click rendition of the page you’re trying to aggregate, allowing you to click the various fields you wish to republish into RSS.

Thanks Dapper!!

P.S. Thank you to US Cutter for offering RSS feeds of the forums!