First a little background: I was looking for an index of publicly traded companies in Winston-Salem and I couldn't find it anywhere. I figured there weren't that many publicly traded companies in W-S so I wondered if I could create one myself. That's when the fun began.
First I logged onto the Forsyth County Library's research site, which is free by the way. Then I used the ProQuest feed from Hoovers to look up all Winston-Salem companies that they track (about 30 total). Of those I found seven publicly traded companies and I created my own little tracking index on my.yahoo.
I was going to leave it at that, but then I got to wondering if there was any way to get a script that would allow me to post the index on my blog. Within a few minutes I found a free service called barchart.com. All I had to do was input those same seven companies' trading symbols into their system and it kicked out a piece of javascript that I could post on my site. Pretty cool.
Then I thought a little more about it and decided that I'd like to create a blog focused solely on business related information for Winston-Salem. I've been in W-S for about a year and in that time I've been doing a lot of reading and research on the local business community and I figured a blog would be as good a way as any to keep track of this stuff. That led me to create the Winston-Salem Business blog.
Over the course of about 2 1/2 hours I set up the template, built some link lists to local publications, business groups, etc. and wrote a couple of fairly generic posts. Then I thought it might be fun to see if I could set up a newsfeed for Winston-Salem and Forsyth County business.
Back to my.yahoo I went. I set up a news search for "winston-salem"+"business" "forsyth county"+"business", and copied the "rss.xml" link. Then I found a free service called rss-to-javascript.com that allows me to put in any RSS feed and it spits out a piece of javascript. I can then paste the javascript into my site and voila, I have my own customized newsfeed.
This is pretty amazing. I've essentially built my own customized business news site for next to nothing (I use Typepad which gives me three blogs for a flat fee, so technically I guess it's costing me about $4 a month). If I wanted to I guess I could commercialize it with very little effort, although to build readership would take lots of effort and keeping it relevant and fresh even more blood, sweat and tears.
I guess what I'm most amazed at is how quickly and easily I could physically pull together a business news site. It just drives home the fact that a properly motivated entrepreneur could pop up almost out of nowhere and start eating the local business press's lunch.
**Update** While Barchart.com seems to load every time, it looks like by rss-to-javascript.com service is worth what I paid for it (0). It only loads about 20% of the time. I'll try and find a better feed at some point.
**Update #2** It doesn't look like it was the fault of rss-to-javascript.com for the non-loading. It seems that Yahoo!'s feed was iffy, so I went with Craigslist for jobs and the Biz Journal for the business feeds. Only negative is that those "Triad" focus, not the more defined "Winston-Salem" focus I was looking for. If I can get a more focused, customizable feed I will, but for now this will do.
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