UPS Tracking With RSS

UPS Tracking With RSS: "UPS Package Tracking With RSS

Note: This article was originally in the form of a post on my blog.
Overview

I always hated the fact that there was no good 'push' mechanism for getting UPS shipment tracking updates. I don't want to go to their website every hour to see where my package is. I want to be notified when it moves. Of course I immediately thought of RSS, but I couldn't find anyone who had turned the UPS data into a feed. I then decided to make it myself in ASP.NET using C#!

I threw together a working version. The url is in this format: http://www.young-technologies.com/utilities/packagetracking/rsstracking.aspx?Type=UPS&TrackingNumber=XXXXXXXXX where the XXXXXXX's are the UPS tracking number you want to track.

It doesn't use screen scraping, which can be unreliable. If I wrote it that way, I would have to change my interface every time UPS decided to change their website. I found out that UPS had an XML interface to get their tracking information directly. I wrote a .NET dll to make the request, and process the response into an object.

To turn the actual data into an RSS feed, I used a handy class called RSSMaster. They did a great job of making it easy to create an RSS feed from a data source."