We've been trying to provide some coverage of the Angora Ridge Fire on OurTahoe.org despite our limited resources during the Summer. We've been relying mainly on Tahoe residents uploading images to Flickr and RSS feeds from MSM outlets and blogs.

This morning I read an article in Editor & Publisher about how the Tahoe Daily Tribune was covering the fire news "blog-style".

Blog-style?

We've been working with Swift's online folks with the Notebook project, so I know they have serious issues with their CMS. Because the Tahoe Daily Tribue's staff are just updating the same post over and over, it doesn't show up in their RSS feed... and thus can't be aggregated by OurTahoe.org.

Since the fire jumped the line this afternoon and doesn't look like it is going to be put out any time soon, I put my knowledge of regular expressions and XML to use and scraped their "blog-style" page into useful RSS.

http://www.ourtahoe.org/custompages/scrapes/tahoedaily.php

Let me know if you find this useful.

UPDATE:  Even though I told the Tahoe Daily Tribune folks that the "breaking news to RSS" script required them to continue publishing updates using the same mark-up, they changed it.   The new feed is...

http://www.ourtahoe.org/custompages/scrapes/tahoedaily2.php

This is really frustrating since they can't get their feeds working.  Their Publicus (which I've been told is Latin for "piece of sh*t") template has the RSS fed pointed at...

http://www.tahoedaily.com/section/rss01&mime=xml

Obviously that's not going to work since their domain isn't www.tahoedaily.com.  If you change the URL to...

http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/section/rss01&mime=xml

I'm not that upset that they changed the markup of their breaking news page (the new markup as actually easier to scrape), but when I'm trying to help you with technical issues you are obviously struggling with, I'd think you'd at least let me know you were making a change.