A friend of mine mentioned on Twitter that she was “loving” the FeeFieFoeFirm website this morning. I’ve looked at that site in the past, but never really took the time to do any serious searching on it. The timing of this reminder couldn’t have been better. I just happened to be thinking of a project where I wanted a way to gather data on a particular legal topic, written by lawyers, and it turns out that FeeFieFoeFirm just may help me turn that into a reality.
Here’s my idea: Compile a list of recent articles from law firms that discuss Electronic Discovery and (here’s the hard part) keep the list up-to-date via RSS feed.
Well, I’m kind of a search whiz, and heck, I’ve even won awards in the past for creating these types of resources, but quite frankly, this particular idea was kicking my butt. I could easily set up a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) to index the sites I wanted, but I couldn’t set “time restrictions” on those results. Now, enter FeeFieFoeFirm.
Turns out that in January FeeFieFoeFirm figured out a way to put the date on the information they were indexing via Google CSE. This was the key piece I’d been missing. Now I could search for electronic discovery articles that had been written in the past 24 hours:
Very nice!!
But, not everything was peaches and cream in the land of e-discovery article searching. Alas, there was no RSS feed available to help me move the information from FeeFieFoeFirm to an RSS feed.
No problem!!
I turned to one of my favorite tools, Dapper Factory, to help create this step. For those of you that were with the 3 Geeks back in the beginning, you’ll know that I reviewed Dapper Factory and found it to be a great resource in creating RSS feeds or widgets that housed the feeds.
By mashing FeeFieFoeFirm and Dapper Factory together, I found a way to put my idea to the test!! It still has a little tweaking to do, but then most of my ideas do. Go check them both out!!
If you know of other ways to do this type of search to RSS feed, feel free to comment below.