I like checking out the products on Woot!. Each day they’ve got a different wholesale-price product on sale. Sometimes they’ve got really great stuff, which make good gifts around the holidays.
Instead of checking out the site each day, I prefer to get their RSS feed in my Google Reader, along with all my other daily content.
But they also have a blog. Recently, they’ve been writing some posts that are of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever.
Unfortunately, their RSS feed contains both the products and the posts. I wrote to them to see if I could get a products-only feed.
Is there a separate RSS feed for the products only? No offense to you, but I don’t want the blog posts, just the once-daily product listings. Thanks
And their response:
That wasn’t good enough for me. I decided to make my own little program that parses the Woot! feed and only shows product listings.
As an added bonus, it will show the full-size image and not the small version used on the Woot! homepage or official RSS feed.
Anyone is welcome to use it: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyWoot. Also, you can subscribe to daily updates of new products via email.
RSS Link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyWoot
Exactly what I wanted. Glad I googled before making one myself! Out of curiosity, how often does this feed hit the woot feed?
Brett,
My code hits Woot’s RSS feed and parses it for every page load. So there’s no waiting time there.
However, FeedBurner, which hosts the feed, does do some caching on their end. It will usually update every 5-10 minutes, though.
Thanks!
Trevor
You’re a lifesaver. Third hit on Google when I searched “woot rss feed products only,” and you created exactly what I’m looking for.
I was incredibly dissapointed when they changed their feed from products only to include their inane blog entries. I mean, sometimes they’re entertaining, but they’re usually heavy on the images and pointless commentary and light on the interesting, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, thank you so much for this!
Phoenix,
I know exactly how you felt
. I would just skip over them in my reader.
Glad you enjoy it!
Trevor
Is there anyway you could restructure the title of the feed to include the price? Not sure if this is possible but thought I’d ask.
Wow! Just what I needed! Thanks! (any hope on doing similar for shirt.woot?
)
Thank god! I want their deals, but not their crappy WWWroundup every 10 minutes! Thanks for making this, so I don’t have to.
First, thanks for this.
Second, is there a similar one for the subwoots (shirt, wine)?
Frederick,
I didn’t make one for shirt or wine woot because they don’t have as many “side” posts as regular woot. I didn’t bother.
Perfect! Thanks for doing this.
I almost gave up on Woot entirely to skip the blog posts.
Thank you so much! Now if we could only get rid of their lame product descriptions…
Trevor, you are a badass!
i’m getting errors with live bookmarks in firefox 3. any idea what’s going on? it says the url is invalid, which is strange, because it come up just fine in the browser itself.
Thanks. Totally lame of woot not to do this already. Pretty dumb for a comany wanting to sell product.
Gavin,
Woot does actually have a feed similar to mine. However they don’t mention it and they don’t include a full-size image for each of the products.
It doesn’t seem to be working as of this morning.
No, it redirects to the Woot RSS feed, http://www.woot.com/Blog/.
Damn.
It seems to be working: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DailyWoot
If anyone is having more problems, please let me know.
Thanks!
Failed to load for me :\
Back up today, not sure what happened.
My RSS reader (Newz Crawler) tends to give me an error when attempting to read from your DailyWoot feed:
End tag was not expected at this location. Line: 480 <a href=”http:
From perusing the logs, it looks as though the feed ends in – two closing “channel” tags, and two closing “rss” tags, even though each has only been opened once. For the example resulting in the above error, the first three closed tags are on line 480, with the final close-rss on line 481.
Might this be causing the random problems some people (including me) have been seeing?
I do get a successful download of the feed every once in awhile, haven’t yet had a chance to check to see if those same errant tags are there for the successful ones.
Hmm, looks like my cut-and-paste of the offending tags got stripped from my post. Lemme try again, this time using square brackets instead of greater-than/less-than symbols. What the feed ends in is:
[/channel][/rss][/channel][/rss]
Woot! In both senses! This is exactly what I wanted! Now we just need one for shirts.woot.com!
Thanks man!!!! Just what I wanted!
Hey, can you make a feed for the Shirts feed? Thanks man!
Thanks for writing this blog post. Your feed still has some problems showing up in firefox so I created a yahoo pipes filter to only pass through items with the “Discuss this product” string in them.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=oNpbsvQz3hGdK145BR50VA&_render=rss
Yahoo pipes is pretty cool!
Absolutely fantastic. Love the feed, just what I was looking for. Shared on Twitter as well.
Thanks Again.
seems like this feed is just getting all of them again. i had 54 unread items since yesterday, wtf!
Derek,
It’s because there’s a Woot Off. Happy shopping!
Thanks SO much! Exactly what I was looking for. Is there anyway to display when items are sold out?
Hi
I get this error when I try to validate the RSS feed. i would lile to use it but the error prevents me. can you help
Thanks
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 412 at column 728: Extra content at the end of the document
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
Well done, I was looking for something like this, I don’t care about their blogs at all and have fallen out of the woot scene for lack of a better way to check it. Thank you very much for doing what they should have done in the first place
This is perfect! Thank you!