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.