One of the stories up on the poker news page has nothing to do with the card game called poker. It's about a man who was beaten to death by his wife using a fireplace poker. (To make it even more confusing, the story took place in Omaha. How often does a story with the words "Omaha" and "poker" have nothing to do with cards?)

Anyway, this just made me a little curious about how the "poker news" is generated. Is it an automatic feed based on the word "poker"?

(BTW, it was cool to learn that Jerry Orbach was a poker player. He was my wife's favorite TV actor.)

Wow! What a coincidence! Yeah, it's an RSS feed from Yahoo.

I query Yahoo's news servers for 'poker' (subtracting results with 'video' in them, because there are a lot of video poker results otherwise) and get sent back some XML, which is then converted into HTML.

It updates every 15 minutes automatically, too.