PlusOne Scraper: a +1 Feed Generator
After Google decided to ‘revamp’ Google Reader a lot of people are unhappy with the changes. The most glaring loss is removal of the human-curated aspect of the old Reader sharing as Google has removed ability to publicly share stories (unless, of course you are on Google+), replacing them with the questionable ‘+1’. That means no more public RSS feeds of shared items, no more open data from the Goog, troubling indeed.
In an effort to mitigate at least one deficit of the changes, I’ve written a crude scraper that will take any +1’d items from a public Google Profile page (that is set to show +1s) and spit them out into an RSS feed. It is designed to be self-hosted and will likely break soon and often as it is at the mercy of front-end changes to the public profile page. Hopefully the Goog will come around on this one, but in the meantime, this gets the job done (you can see it working on the homepage of this blog).
PlusOne Scraper on SourceForge
Tags: Code, Google, PlusOne Scraper, RSS, Software, SourceForge
This is a cool little tool.
I modified the index.php a bit to get it to work at the moment.
I changed this:
$user = $_GET[‘u’];
$url = ‘https://profiles.google.com/u/0/’.$user.’/plusones’;
to just hard code my user id like this:
$user = $_GET[‘u’];
$url = ‘https://plus.google.com/116437168519004876189/plusones’;
That seemed to do the trick. Plus, if they change I should be able to easily update that url.
Thanks!