Ponyfish RSS Feed Builder

Frequently Asked Questions - Creating a Feed

What kind of pages can Ponyfish create a feed from?

Ponyfish is designed to create a feed from web pages that list links to new items. Some examples include:

News articles
Blogs
Forums/Message boards
Search results
Guestbooks

At this time, Ponyfish cannot create feeds from pages without links to each item that would appear in the feed.

Why doesn't it do anything when I click on links in step 2?

Make sure the web page you're looking at isn't using frames. If it is, point Ponyfish at the URL of the innermost frame that contains the feed items.

You can get the URL of the inner frame in Internet Explorer by right-clicking on the web page, and selecting "Properties". In Firefox, right-click, select "This Frame" and "View Frame Info".

What's this error about a robots.txt file?

Web site owners may choose to setup a robots.txt file, a standard web tool used to prevent engines and other automated "robots" from accessing certain areas of their site. Ponyfish is considered a robot, as it automatically crawls a web page periodically in order to generate feeds. Because it does so, we honor the robots.txt standard, and won't parse a web page whose author doesn't want the web page to be parsed.

If you're a web site owner (or a reader who would like to contact the owner) and want to prevent other robots from parsing your web site but allow access to Ponyfish, you can modify your robots.txt file to look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: Ponyfish
Disallow:

If you try to create a feed and the web page you load in Ponyfish doesn't have the content you see when you normally open it in a browser, or you get error messages regarding a need to log in, you might need to have Ponyfish pass a cookie along with the request.

When you enter the website URL on the Ponyfish create page, click the "Set a cookie" link and enter the name/value pairs contained in the website cookie file. It should look something like this:

cookie1=value1; cookie2=value2; cookie3=value3;

To find out the contents of the necessary cookies, follow the steps below.

Internet Explorer

Go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Privacy -> Advanced
Check "Override automatic cookie handling" and "Prompt" fields
Open the website in the browser
You should see a "Privacy Alert" pop-up window when a cookie is about to be set. Click "More Info".
Combine the values next to Name and Data. e.g. if you see "Name: id" and "Data: 100", then enter "id=100;" in the Ponyfish cookie field.
Click "Allow Cookie" and continue with the previous step as long as you see pop-up windows. Combine multiple cookies with a semi-colon. e.g. "id=100; user=ponyfish;"
Return to Tools -> Internet Options -> Privacy -> Advanced and uncheck "Override automatic cookie handling"

Firefox

Go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> View Cookies
Search for the name of the website
Click on the cookie(s) that appear next to the site name
Combine the values next to Name and Content. e.g. if you see "Name: id" and "Content: 100", then enter "id=100;" in the Ponyfish cookie field.
Combine multiple cookies with a semi-colon. e.g. "id=100; user=ponyfish;"

Opera

Go to Tools -> Advanced -> Cookies
Search for the name of the website
Click on the cookie(s) that appear next to the site name and click "Edit"
Combine the values under Name and Value. e.g. if you see "Name: id" and "Value: 100", then enter "id=100;" in the Ponyfish cookie field.
Combine multiple cookies with a semi-colon. e.g. "id=100; user=ponyfish;"

Safari

Go to Safari -> Preferences -> Show Cookies
Search for the name of the website
Combine the values under Name and Contents next to the site name. e.g. if you see "Name: id" and "Value: 100", then enter "id=100;" in the Ponyfish cookie field.
Combine multiple cookies with a semi-colon. e.g. "id=100; user=ponyfish;"

I just can't get Ponyfish to create a feed. Can you help?

If you can't get Ponyfish to create a feed for a specific web page, post about it here. Your feedback is important for us to help make Ponyfish a better product, and we'll do our best to make it work with the web pages you're trying out. However, there are some sites that Ponyfish just can't parse, and we can't promise it ever will.