Dapper Lessenberry: An RSS feed of Jack’s MetroTimes columns
I started reading the Detroit “alternative weekly” the MetroTimes when I, like many of my friends, discovered it was the best source of live music listings in the region. But, unlike most of my friends, I soon began to pick it up more for the articles than the show listings (”I read it for the articles! Really!”).
In particular, I always looked forward to the lucid analysis of Jack Lessenberry, a veteran journalist always willing to call out absurdity and incompetence where he saw it (and there is sadly a lot of it). Having fled the dismal state of affairs so well documented by Mr. Lessenberry, I’ve not been closely following the continued decline — beyond noticing Pfizer’s ax falling in Ann Arbor and the general condition of Detroit — mostly because the MetroTimes can’t get their act together and publish some RSS feeds, and the state of the print media is Michigan has been on rapid decline since the bitter and ugly newspaper strikes.
This evening, I caught up on Jack’s columns to get a sense for just how bad things are in my home state. It’s even worse than I thought. He got my hopes up in his February 14th column about Gov. Granholm’s State of he State address, where he pretended she actually said something courageous and necessary. She didn’t.
Anyway, on to the Geekery. So I’ve been doing some screen-scraping of web sites lately, mostly for viralvideos.com — and I recently discovered Dapper, a tool designed to make this easier, without writing code. I noticed the MetroTimes had a “search by author” feature, so I decided to try and use Dapper to generate a feed of Lessenberry’s MetroTimes columns that I can receive in my feed reader of choice. It took me about 20 minutes.
