Dapper

So Andrew has been talking about Dapper and Pedro about kapow, both screen scraping (sort of) services that let you extract data from websites. It's interesting and potentially useful stuff.

Here's my Dapped contribution: an RSS feed of advance access articles from Bioinformatics and NAR. I tried putting Nature advance publications in there but shamefully the nature.com markup isn't up to scratch or something and Dapper refuses to pull out the correct pieces of data consistently. Neh.

There's a little bit of custom PHP code involved to create links for each paper from the doi, to extract publication dates and to merge the two dap RSS feeds - this seems like the kind of thing Pipes was designed for but unfortunately it's not quite flexible enough yet.

I made the original bioinformatics and NAR daps public if you want to tweak them.