The last couple of days I've been (among a gazillion other things) playing around with KapowTech's Mashup Server products. Kapow's product suite consist of several programs that enables you to create your own robots for traversing the webpages and retrieving content in a structured mannor, so that you can use it on your own site. They support both dynamic retrieval of web-clips, and one-time data-collection. The last part is what I find particularly interesting for EPiServer cause that presents itself as an easy way to migrate a lot of already existing content to a new EPiServer installation.
To proof my point I did the following:
- Used Kapow's ModelMaker application to make a data-model that resembled a new EPiServer PageType I had made - "Movie". This step could in the future easily be automated cause the model is basically just an xml-file that describes a series of properties and their types.
- Used Kapow's RoboMaker to create a robot that would visit IMDB's list of top 250 movies, and then for each movie extract the Title, Director and Tag-line as well as the main cast-list. After I had read and followed a "Getting Started" guide included in the documentation, it took me about 30min - 1 hour to make this and troubleshoot it.
- Ran the robot and got a list of the movies in an XML file.
- Used my Simple Page Import WebService to import the pages on my testsite, allan.epidesk.com. See the results here.
Conclusion: KapowTech seems like a really easy way to migrate a lot of existing web contents if the pages are structured in the same way.
Recent posts