How neat is that? I was visiting LookSmart’s Find Articles and saw a link at the bottom to the RSS Site Map - this is a site map of all of the RSS feeds available on the site. They also offer RSS Feeds for your search results.
I was looking for Judith Siess and scrolled down to the bottom where I found the RSS Alert button for my search.
Very handy!
As you know, I’m always reading about new online tools. I like to try them out before I write about them (if I have time) - this brings me to my pet peeve. I don’t like it when I can’t see a demo (or screenshots) of a tool without first signing up. Today it’s xFruits which sounds pretty darn cool:
xFruits is sweet! It's a suite of RSS services that's all about feeds. You can use xFruits as an aggregator, to create a PDF from your feed, add a mobile feed or even post to RSS via e-mail. All these services areen't really new but why use different sites and logins if it can be done at one place! Next to that, it also rolls all xFruits users into a community
This description is from A Feed Is Born - I went to the site but there is no way for me to see what the aggregator looks like without first signing up (which I’ll probably do once I’m done ranting here).
A note to developers - always provide a way for people to see your product - a demo account or screenshots. You don’t buy a new outfit without seeing and trying it on first - why should a web application be any different?
Okay, rant done. I’m off to sign up for xFruits.
Well, what isn’t?? An online friend of mine sent me a link last week that talked about how subscribing to RSS feeds could be a security risk - today I found a similar article on News.com.
Attackers could exploit the problem by setting up a malicious blog and enticing a user to subscribe to the RSS feed. More likely, however, they would add malicious JavaScript to the comments on a trusted blog, [Bob] Auger said.
What do I have say about that? Well, Duh! If people can spam our email with viruses, then they can surely hit us through our RSS feeds, but that’s why we (bloggers) install protections like Spam Karma (and other such comment filters) and why we all install spy ware protection and anti-virus software on our computers.
It’s no different than email in that respect - you open yourself up to being hacked/attacked whenever you let someone else deliver content directly to your computer.
As you know I have finally signed up for FeedBurner - but why the change? Well I was getting a little annoyed with depending on Bloglines to tell me how many subscribers I have. Bloglines was telling me that I had something like 28 subscribers - After 2 days FeedBurner says I have 79 (and I’m sure there are still more people who haven’t used the new feed URL yet).
I’m not sure why the difference, but I knew (based on page visits & comments) that there were more than 30 of you out there reading to see what I learned today. Thanks for bearing with me and updating your aggregators!
Today I learned that you can’t trust Bloglines count of subscribers (especially since there are a lot more readers out there to choose from).
I have been having problems with Bloglines since they did their maintenance the other day. My feeds keep saying there are new posts, but when I click to read I get no results. Sometime changing the “Display items within the last” to a longer timeframe will make posts show up - when that works the posts are dated today or yesterday. Anyway, I’m getting a little annoyed - and probably missing some important posts.
How cool is this? I did a search for Sunday Circulars because I want to go out and buy another bookshelf. I visited Target’s site and right away an RSS button jumped out at me on the left side of the page. See here.
You can get the Sunday specials delivered to your aggregator! RSS is everywhere - I love it!
Most of you already know of this tool - or one like it - but I keep forgetting what’s it’s called and then I have to search for it - so here you go. To combine RSS feeds into one simple feed use something like FeedShake which not only lets you combine feeds, but you can apply filters to prevent certain results from showing up. Pretty handy!
I gave 2 presentations today at the Pennsylvania Bar Institute, and a presenter there said that Bloglines won’t be free much longer. I don’t know where he got his information - I wanted to see if any of you had heard this?? Can you point me to an article or some documentation about what’s going to happen? Or was this man just mis-informed?
[update 7/31/06] For those of you who aren’t reading the comments - this presenter was very wrong. This has been confirmed by Ryan Phillips Bloglines.com Engineer in the comments. Thanks Ryan! [/update]
Technorati Tags: bloglines
I just read about Kebberfegg on SEW. It’s a neat little tool for generating RSS feeds:
Kebberfegg is a tool to help you generate large sets of keyword-based RSS feeds at one time. Keyword-based RSS feeds (some people call them “search based feeds”) are those RSS feeds generated as a result of doing a search — for example, both Yahoo News and Google News have keyword-based RSS feeds.
Keyword-based feeds are great because they can save you a lot of time by automatically updating search results and sending them to your RSS feed reader. But it can take a lot of time to set up all the keyword-based feeds you might want to use across several different resources. Kebberfegg gives you one place to set up as many as three dozen keyword-based RSS feeds at a time, in yummy HTML or OPML flavors.
I’m off to play.
TangognaT asked for a resource yesterday that I think we would all like to see.
I'm trying to see if someone has put together a master list of the library and information science journals that offer tables of contents as RSS feeds. I can find some lists of academic journals in general that offer news feeds, but I'm having a hard time tracking down a list that is specific to library science. It seems to me like this is the type of thing someone would have put together.
So, is anyone working on this? Does anyone know of a resource that might be help someone set up a list like this? If so post a comment over at TangognaT.
TechCrunch has a great piece on The State of Online Feed Readers. It includes a handy chart showing you all of the features each reader offers. It covers:
I’ll have to read this more thoroughly and see if Bloglines is still the right tool for me to be using.
Answers.com has a bunch of fun little RSS feeds available like Word of the Day and Birthdays Today. If you have the time to read one more feed give them a try.
Oh Cool! Another way to show our geekdom. Visit Kiss My RSS and get your own RSS gear (shirts, mugs, bags, etc).
Thanks A Feed Is Born for bringing it to LiB’s attention - who brought it to my attention 
My RSS Feed is doing something funny. A bunch of posts that I didn’t touch today have shown up as updated. I am still playing with settings and plugins for this new release - so I’m just going to assume it’s a problem with that and apologize to you all for the many new posts you’re seeing in your readers.
I got my password for the Edgeio demo the other day and I logged in and couldn’t think of any way to use this service. What is Edgeio?
edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the edgeio website and through an open set of web services. Our goal is to give publishers of all sizes the means to control how their content is published, discovered, and consumed. By doing so, edgeio provides everyone easy, up to date, access to content from the Internet’s edge.
As I was saying, I couldn’t think of a use for this service - why would I have an RSS for items for sale on my site? Then I read Library Stuff and saw Steven’s idea.
Instead of weeding books from the catalog that you were going to sell at a book sale, post the book information to a blog (make sure to use Structured Blogging) and tag it as “listing”. This way, Edgeio will index the content.
What a great idea! We are planning on setting up a database for books for sale at the library - and all I have to do is set up an RSS feed and TaDa! they’ll be listed on Edgeio. Anyone else have ideas for how to use this service in libraries?
On our new Intranet we allow the staff to pick up to 3 RSS feeds to be published right on their homepage. We used a PHP Class called LastRSS as our parser. We were able to customize it to pull URLs out our database and to make it display things the way we wanted. I know there are other options out there, but I haven’t tried them - yet.
I know the title is What I Learned Today… but there is something I’d like to learn. How do you get Firefox to notice that there is an RSS feed available on a page? I see the icon show in my address bar for some sites - but not for the library’s site - even though we have a feed.
Thanks for the pointers!
I mentioned MailFeed a litle while ago and today I did a little ego searching on Google Blog Search and found this:
Of all the links of the last days I’d like to point you to the reaction I was most happy about, written by Nicole Engard. She had sent me an email earlier, and when I was looking through my referers I found her blog entry “No more email newsletters for me“, go check it out. And check out her blog as well, “What I learned today…“, where she writes about contemporary tools of Internet communication; proving Clay Shirky’s insight that it’s usually the librarian types who are on the forefront of information management, and who already know methods we will all be using in the future. If you are a geek having problems with structuring and accessing large pools of information, talk to a librarian.
I LOVE IT!!
Keep up the good work and if you want to get ahead keep complimenting us “librarian types”
RSS Compendium lists the greatest tools! I have been waiting for some of the mailing lists I subscribe to to offer RSS feeds instead - since I read news on Bloglines much more than I read those newsletters 9I have about 300 unread in my mailbox) - now I don’t have to wait any longer. MailFeed.org makes it so that you can create an RSS feed out of a newsletter subscription.
Ever had to subscribe to an email newsletter or mailing list because no feed was available? Ever needed to quickly create a multi-author RSS feed? This service gives you an email address that can be read by an RSS 2.0 aggregator, and you don’t even have to register.
E.g., send mail to
despoilment@mailfeed.org
and read it via
http://mailfeed.org/rss2/despoilment
All feeds are open to the public, which means it’s very easy to set up new addresses and even share them among a group of people (technically you don’t even have to visit this site to set up a new feed).
I’m off to figure out how to make this work for me!
Update: The first newsletter I tried to subscribe to requires that I confirm my email address before they’ll send me the newsletter - Hmmm - I have submitted a note to the MailFeed people and will keep you posted on their response.
Update 2: Martin Dittus from MailFeed replied to my message promptly! Turns out that the feed I set up actually caught the confirmation email and I was able to active my subscription/feed that way!
Update 3: Okay so the feed works - but bloglines won’t read it and I’m not sure why.
Oh - I’m going to have so much fun with this one!
I just read on RSS Compendium about the Automatic RSS Feed Button Maker.
To make it easier and more convenient for readers of your blog to subscribe to your RSS feed, this RSS feed button maker tool will create over 15 different buttons that embed your blog’s RSS feed for feed readers and feed aggregators including: Rojo, My Yahoo, Bloglines, newsgator, My MSN, Pluck, NewsBurst, searchfox, Google Reader, My AOL, del.icio.us, Feedster, Furl and also for Yahoo My web.
It will also create links to make it easier for site visitors to bookmark your site using Del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl, RawSugar, Simpy, Shadows and Blink.
Steven Cohen frequently mentions how unorganized he is - well maybe this nifty tool would help - ReminderFeed.
ReminderFeed is a FREE reminder service tool that works through your feed reader. Simply fill out the form below, then add the RSS Link to your feed reader. It’s that simple!
What I’d like to see is a way to add multiple reminders easily - right now it’s just one reminder - or a reminder for something that re-occurs everyday.
This new invention will be a great help to those of us who can’t keep up with our RSS feeds … the rsstroom reader is:
a bathroom gadget that prints news feeds onto your T-P - that’s right, your TOILET PAPER! The best part is the “biometrics” toilet seat that’ll figure out who you are based on your weight and prints the news you want - not your roommates tabloid garbage.
LOL! This is too funny! And very professionally done, there is even a Press Release for you to read.
RSS Scraper is a nifty little tool that lets you notify people of updates to your HTML pages with RSS.
If you have an item in your page you'd like to include in the RSS feed e.g:
New product this week!
Just released! This book will increase your business profits by 1000%You simply need to put <span class=”rss:item”> … </span> around the item. So your HTML will look something like this:
<span class=”rss:item”><b><a href=”http://www.bizdome.com/”>New product this week!<br>Just released! This book will increase your business profits by 1000%</span>
Sounds pretty handy if you don't have a database driven page … but I do see one problem in the code above … it's missing a </a></b> before the <br> … just FYI if you plan on using this.
Now you can generate RSS feeds to watch for specific item on Amazon. The Amazon Keword Watch tool asks for your location, product group, keywords, and sort type; then it generates an RSS feed for you to subscribe to. That's not all … you can also make a TinyURL right from the form. Nifty!
I just found this new service … and it's not in beta! It's called ScoopGO! and it lets you put together you own little search engine. ScoopGO! has you set up your own scoops by choosing related RSS feeds to lump together … and then makes them searchable. One of there examples:
Scoop world news: searches the latest news headlines of your choice
The first step is to decide on which sources (websites) you trust and want to include in your Scoop. Then, get the “feed urls” from those website… Then simply choose “create Scoop” from the menu (left top, after registering). Give your Scoop a name - in this case simply “world news” - and let ScoopGO! know what feeds you want to search. We chose the feeds mentioned below for this Scoop, but you can choose any feed from any website you like:
» http://www.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss (CNN topstories)
» http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss091.xml (BBC topstories)
» http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/us (Yahoo news topstories)
» http://today.reuters.com/rss/topnews (Reuters topstories)
» http://rss.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032091/device/rss/rss.xml (MSNBC headlines)
Then you can search the results or view them all via the Dashboard for your scoop. The Dashboard is sort of like a feed reader. It lets you see all of the headlines (and descriptions if you choose) for your scoop in one place.
This is a pretty handy little tool. Thanks RSS Compendium for pointing it out.
