I’ve always been an open source fan and for the past 2 or 3 years I’ve been working with JBoss products - lately JBoss Portal. So, I decided I want to become more active in the JBoss Portal forums on JBoss.com - unfortunately, though, their forums aren’t RSS-enabled and I’m a big RSS user.

So, I decided to use one of my favorite, free web-tools - Yahoo Pipes - to build an RSS feed for the JBoss.com forums.

In short, the pipe does the following:

1. uses a URL Builder object to “scrape” the jboss.com forum site
2. passes in a parameter of the forum ID to read (ie: 215 for the Portal User’s forum, 205 for the Portal design forum)
3. uses regular expressions to slice and dice the fetched page into an aggregated RSS feed

Because the forum ID is a parameter, you can add any JBoss.com forum to your RSS client of choice. The feed results aren’t perfect (eg: doesn’t get the original post date right), but it does the trick for my needs.

So check out the JBoss.com Forum Feeds Pipe at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pembertonandy/jbossforums

Feel free to clone the pipe and use it to your liking; the same technique can be used on any publicly available site. Let me know if you like it!