The RSS cookbook - 10 advanced RSS tricks
There is an interesting development in the world of RSS. At first, RSS feeds were mostly used for frequently updated but fixed content, for example, latest articles on a website. Lately, many sites are incorporating RSS feeds for content which can be rapidly changing, like searches or tags. On top of that, there are ways to combine (or blend - hence the cookbook) several RSS feeds into one feed (using RSS mixers), which makes for some interesting possibilities. Here are 10 tricks that I personally use for devouring content from the web.
1. RSS (re)mixing
First trick is simple, but we’ll use it in almost every other trick in this list - mixing several RSS feeds into one big feed. Luckily, there’s no need to do this manually as there are many online services that can do it for you. For the purposes of this article, I’ll use various RSS mixers, but here is the simplest of them all: Feedblendr. Enter up to three feeds, and blend. No registration.
2. The del.icio.us blend
Each tag on del.icio.us has an RSS feed (it’s in the bottom of the page). Let’s say I want to know of every new link related to WebOS, DRM, and copyright. It’s easy to blend the RSS feeds for these three del.icio.us tags into one feed using Feedblendr, or alternatively you can use the del.icio.us inbox to blend the tags and then simply use the RSS feed for the entire inbox. OK, but say we want to filter bookmarks with some specific words? For this we will use FeedShake. Write the feed URLs (separate them with a single space) in the top box and add some words into the filter below, and you’re done. BTW, while we’re at del.icio.us, a simple way to get RSS feeds for tags is to use the following syntax: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/keyword.
3. Follow submissions from your site on Digg
Here’s a nice way to see if someone has submitted an article from your site on Digg. In Digg’s search options, choose “URL only” and type your domain name into the search box. Then, click the little RSS icon on the right, and save it in RSS reader of your choice. Voila! Of course, if you have more than one domain, you can (again) combine several RSS feeds into one using a RSS mixer.
4. Package tracking
Nothing much to say about this one, just go here, enter your email and tracking number and track any shipment from UPS, FedEX, USPS or DHL.
5. The ultimate weather forecast
Annoyed with inaccuracies of weather forecasts? I’m not, I don’t go outside. But if you are, take all the services that have weather forecast feeds for a specific location (I’ve used BBC Weather, Yahoo Weather and Weather.com). Blend them all using one of aforementioned methods. You now have the ultimate weather forecast, and you can compare who’s right and who’s wrong. Here’s my weather feed for Zagreb, Croatia.
6. The version tracker
On Sourceforge, every project has its own RSS feed. Blend them all, and you got a nice big version tracker for the apps you use. If you want non-sourceforge apps, go to Version Tracker’s RSS feeds. Feeds for individual items are not available, but there are feeds for every category and subcategory. Blending these feeds with SourceForge should be enough to cover most of the apps you use.
7. The auto-blog
You’d like to have a linkblog with stuff that interests you, but you don’t want to spend any time writing? Fine. There are many ways to do this; I’ll show how to do it using R-Mail. R-Mail is a service that lets you receive RSS feeds via e-mail. Blend your RSS feeds like above. When you have the perfect feed, enter it into R-Mail, and it will send the whole thing to the address of your choice. This next part is taken directly from R-Mail FAQ: “When you receive an R-mail subscription, the email has three links. The first link is for normal subscriptions, where an unsubscribe link is provided with each new email received. The second link is for clean subscriptions and does not include the unsubscribe link. If your blogging software has an email gateway, then you can use this second link to automagically post content on a blog. Some blogging email gateways require that you specify which email addresses are allowed to post to your blog. R-mail send subscription requests from request@r-mail.org and sends entries from alert@r-mail.org.” Voila - a blog full of links for the ultimate sloth.
8. The auto-community
This is even better than the auto-blog. We need Pligg for this one. If you’re not familiar with Pligg, it’s a CMS that lets you create a customizable Digg-like site out of the box. However, to have a social content site, you need a community, right? Wrong. The latest version of Pligg has an option of automatic RSS posting. Take a feed (del.icio.us tag feeds give good results here) go to Pligg admin panel, choose RSS Importer, and add some feeds. You can have thousands of items on the site in no time.
9. The favorite blogger book
For this trick we’ll use a great little RSS Mixer called xFruits. Amongs its many useful options, there’s an especially interesting one that lets you convert RSS feeds to PDF files. The PDF file is automatically recreated every 2 hours if the feed content has changed. For your convenience, I’ve already created a PDF with the latest posts from this blog. Print it, read it.
This is nice, however, the initial idea for this trick was to make a blend of your favorite feeds and then convert them to a huge book of wisdom in PDF format. It’s possible to do that, but it won’t be very useful as the RSS to PDF function is currently limited to 10 feed items, which I hope will change in the future.
10. The everything feed
I’m not sure how many people use Google search history, but it doesn’t seem to be too popular. However, if you slap it as an RSS feed somewhere, it’s nice to have. It contains all your Google searches and the items you actually clicked on. But, if you’re the ultimate information junkie, this might not enough - you might want to have an RSS feed of all results on a particular search. You can do that easily with Yahoo! Search. Use the following string:
http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/
webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=keyword
and just replace “keyword” with a (duh) keyword. If you want to do the same thing with Google, the best way that I know of is by using Google Alert. Yahoo is ahead of Google on this one, they really have great RSS support. You can find more about it at their official RSS page.
January 15th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
[…] franticindustries points out that this is also a good way to keep track of articles from your site that have been posted to Digg. Of course you could just install Gregarious and click each individual blog post and see if it was submitted to Digg (or enable email alerts whenever one of your articles is posted), but this is much easier and less annoying way of keeping track. Just type in your url, choose ‘url’ in the first box, click search, and subscribe to the feed. […]
January 15th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Thank you for the tips. Also, Yahoo!, unlike Google allows to display search results via an RSS feed. Using the API request for example:
http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid= yahoosearchwebrss&query=rss&adult_ok=1
You can modify the “query” variable and subscirbe to results via your favourite reader to keep track of how well your site is doing for a specific search.
January 16th, 2007 at 1:39 am
Pretty good list, some of the items i didn’t know, but i’ll test them now.
January 16th, 2007 at 5:21 am
A note about “The del.icio.us blend” you state:
“t’s easy to blend the RSS feeds for these three del.icio.us tags into one feed using Feedblendr, or alternatively you can use the del.icio.us inbox to blend the tags and then simply use the RSS feed for the entire inbox.”
Actually you don’t need to use the inbox or external services: del.icio.us creates feeds of two or more aggregated tags just fine.
Example: the aggregated search http://del.icio.us/nicoladagostino/del.icio.us strumenti (where ’strumenti’ is the italian word for tools) has a corresponding feed which is
http://del.icio.us/rss/nicoladagostino/del.icio.us strumenti
It’s simple as that!
Nicola “del.icio.us” D’Agostino
http://www.nezmar.com/category/english
January 16th, 2007 at 6:09 am
@Nicola: I think I understand what you mean, but I haven’t been able to make it work. I’ve tried several different syntaxes, but no go. Can you clarify a bit? Your links also don’t work.
January 16th, 2007 at 7:04 am
[…] The RSS cookbook - 10 advanced RSS tricks - franticindustries […]
January 16th, 2007 at 9:46 am
[…] taken from francticindustries, here are 10 cool things you can do with RSS feeds. my personal favorite is blending RSS feeds together to make one master feed. Feedblendr is the site mentioned which does it the quickest and easiest. try combining weather feeds for your area to create the amazing awesome all-knowing abracadra weather feed…. […]
January 16th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
[…] The RSS cookbook - 10 advanced RSS tricks - franticindustries. (tags: rss tutorials) […]
January 16th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
[…] Ha ragione Darren Rowse a sostenere che gli RSS readers non sostituiranno i web browsers ancora per un po’ di tempo e le sue argomentazioni a riguardo mi sembrano piuttosto convincenti. Tuttavia a chi, come me, si tiene aggiornato sopratutto grazie ai RSS feeds mi sento di dare qualche consiglio prendendo spunto anche dai trucchi suggeriti da franticindustries. Prima di tutto l’RRS Reader. Ne ho provati diversi, ora sto utilizzando Feedreader 3 che ha il pregio di essere gratuito, leggero, veloce e personalizzabile. Fino a poco tempo fa utilizzavo RSS Bandit che consiglio solo a chi dispone di un hardware sufficientemente performante perché è piuttosto persante e lento. Tengo sotto controllo alcuni feeds anche attraverso gli elementi che ho aggiunto sulla mia home page personalizzata di Google: tra l’altro mi sto trovando particolarmente bene con Google Reader che mette a disposizione un comodo gadget da inserire nella propria home page di Google. Con i Feeds si possono fare anche altre belle cose. Ad esempio si possono miscelare feeds diversi gratuitamente, senza nemmeno doversi registrare, utilizzando FeedBlender per poi aggiungere il cocktail così creato ad un qualsiasi Feed Reader online o offline. A titolo esemplificativo ho creato il “Web 2.0 Italiano - Feed Blend” che ho inserito nella colonna sinistra di questo blog sotto il bottone arancione di Feedburner. Lo stesso risultato può essere conseguito inserendo alcuni blog tra i propri preferiti in Technorati per poi aggiungere dove si preferisce il feed generato dal mixaggio dei preferiti; il mix che viene eseguito automaticamente da Technorati. Se volete prima mixare dei feeds e poi filtrare la miscela risultante indicando alcune parole specifiche, dovete, invece, utilizzare FeedShake, che è un servizio gratuito, per il cui utilizzo è però richiesta la registrazione, ma ne vale la pena. Un servizio ancora più avanzato è xFruits che vi consernte di creare un vostro book personale in formato PDF mixando i vostri RSS preferiti. Indicate gli RSS che vi interessa stampare e xFruits genererà un file PDF ogni 2 ore. Ho creato per voi l’RSS feed di questo blog in formato PDF in modo che possiate stamparlo e leggerlo comodamente. Happy Feeds a tutti! Bookmark to: […]
January 17th, 2007 at 8:28 am
[…] Nei miei consueti giri quotidiani sul web sono incappato in un sito, The RSS cookbook, che elenca e spiega una lista di “10 advanced RSS tricks”, dieci “trucchi avanzati con i feed”. […]
January 17th, 2007 at 8:30 am
[…] In my daily dose of web-wandering I landed on a web site, The RSS cookbook, that lists and discusses a list of “10 advanced RSS tricks”. Among these there’s a note, titled “The del.icio.us blend” where it is stated that: “It’s easy to blend the RSS feeds for these three del.icio.us tags into one feed using Feedblendr, or alternatively you can use the del.icio.us inbox to blend the tags and then simply use the RSS feed for the entire inbox.” […]
January 17th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Stan: looks like my links don’t work on this web site because of the formatting and rewriting of urls in comments: there’s a space that messes it all.
The bottom line is that on del.icio.us you can get tag aggregation in web pages and rss feeds just adding tags with the ” ” sign (all together, no spaces).*
Check it out on my blog where I reposted the comment and the urls work:
http://www.nezmar.com/delicious-aggregation/
nda
* I’ve been using these aggregated feeds for more than a year to pitch proposals for news items and pieces for magazines.
January 17th, 2007 at 10:35 am
@Nicola: ah, I get it. The sign, or the “plus” sign, is used to concatenate search terms. Thx for the tip.
January 17th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Stan: yep, the ” ” is the key.
And don’t mention it, it’s been a pleasure. I delight, I might say.
nda
January 17th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Another great article Stan!
I looked at your exchange above… the del.icio.us URL only works to AND tags together, not OR. For example, the will return 8 entries that have both tags: http://del.icio.us/col_hogan/free+software. Yet this returns nothing, because I do not have any bookmarks with both tags: http://del.icio.us/col_hogan/vlog+or+blog.
January 19th, 2007 at 4:02 am
@Chris: that’s correct, thank you.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:46 am
[…] The RSS cookbook - 10 advanced RSS tricks Mix it up with Feedblendr, del.icio.us, FeedShake, Digg and more. [franticindustries, via Micro Persuasion] […]
January 20th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Here are a couple more sites that add value to your feedsd:
- feedcycle.co.uk - scheduled/daily delivery of feed items; useful for ‘read a chapter a day’ tiype services for pre-written content (e.g. a book) that should be read in sequence on a daily basis, according to when you subscribe
- searchfeedr.com - use the pages or domains listed in an rss feed to feed page or domain based search limits into a google, yahoo, etc search; like rollyo on steroids
January 25th, 2007 at 7:18 am
[…] The RSS cookbook - 10 advanced RSS tricks (tags: rss list howto feeds blog tools) […]
January 29th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Good article! Not much to add.
* ask.com offers RSS feeds via blogline for results.
* I am using Textpattern and the RSS plugin of choice is bit_rss which can blend multiple feeds. It uses SimplePie to fetch and parse the feeds. To shorten the body text of full feeds there is the possibility to use rss_auto_excerpt in combination with bit_rss.
* A very sophisticated way to blend feeds is to aggregate them in BlogBridge (a recommended feed reader) in a collection (called guide) and publish that guide via BlogBridge service which creates a live OPML link on their server. With that OPML link you can feed OPML capable RSS mixers … and so on
February 2nd, 2007 at 6:38 pm
[…] The RSS cookbook - 10 advanced RSS tricks - franticindustries. (tags: chapter4 toblog) […]
February 15th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
[…] 10 trucchi RSS […]
February 28th, 2007 at 7:58 am
[…] The RSS Cookbook: 10 Advanced RSS Tricks […]
March 26th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Cool! kabababrubarta
May 13th, 2007 at 5:28 am
Very cool RMail trick. I had tried to do sometihng like that at one point on blogspot, but gave up and switched to Tumblr (http://engtech.tumblr.com) instead since it has native RSS importing capabilities.
May 19th, 2007 at 5:38 am
[…] Beyond the basic function of reading blogs, many users are employing advanced feed techniques. You can learn some of these techniques here and here. […]
October 8th, 2007 at 2:57 am
[…] changing, like searches or tags. On top of that, there are ways to combine (or blend - hence the cookbook) several RSS feeds into one feed (using RSS mixers), which makes for some interesting […]
November 29th, 2007 at 5:44 am
[…] The RSS cookbook - 10 advanced RSS tricks at franticindustries - web 2.0, social networking, IT tech… (tags: chapter4 week4) […]
January 4th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Very nice article. Putting too much Ads to the RSS is not too friendly for the subscribers as well. Thanks
October 16th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
[…] Rss Cookbook: Ten Advanc… […]
October 16th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
[…] Rss Cookbook: Ten Advanced RSS Tricks […]
October 17th, 2008 at 9:51 am
[…] Rss Cookbook: Ten Advanced RSS Tricks […]
October 17th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
[…] Rss Cookbook: Ten Advanced RSS Tricks […]
October 17th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
[…] Rss Cookbook: Ten Advanced RSS Tricks […]
March 6th, 2009 at 7:14 am
[…] Rss Cookbook: Ten Advanced RSS Tricks […]
April 6th, 2009 at 8:41 am
bolivia furniture importer uranus fats
April 8th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
My submissions: ,
May 27th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Great post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new subscriber- me!
June 13th, 2009 at 1:17 am
Where to buy cheap replacement fujitsu fpcbp68 battery? here you will find high quality and low price fpcbp68 fujitsu 6-cells laptop battery(merry christmas , free shipping).1 year warranty,brand new,shipping fast!
June 13th, 2009 at 1:18 am
NEW fujitsu 9-cells fpcbp63 battery, fpcbp63 Battery. 6600 mAh 11.1V (Compatible with 10.8V)–We are dedicated to offer you the highest quality Lenovo fujitsu fpcbp63 Battery with reasonable prices. All of our products have passed strict quality assurance procedures to achieve international standards such as CE, UL Listed, and/or ISO9001/9002 certification.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for posting.