The best free and sophisticated RSS tools
The past few weeks, I have been quite busy working with RSS feeds. I continue to be surprised about the possibilities RSS gives us, bloggers and web developers alike.
Here is an overview of the tools I discovered:
From RSS feed to Javascript: Feed2JS
If you want to spice up a page on your website, or integrate a feed into a blog widget, then have a look at Feed2JS. They offer an easy, fast and gratis way to convert any RSS feed into a simple Javascript. Each time the page with that Javascript is run, it displays the contents of the feed as if it were content on your page.
As an example, I took this feed from Humanitarian News:
http://humanitariannews.org/blog/9/feed
…and ran it through their feed2JS builder. You can customize the options: display the content of each feed item – or only the first x characters, open the links in a new browser window or not,… If you are really sophisticated, you can even customize the style sheet.
Hit “Generate JavaScript”, and you will get the code to integrate on your site. In my case, the code snippet looked like this:
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://feed2js.org//feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fhumanitariannews.org%2Fblog%2F9%2Ffeed&chan=y&desc=1&targ=y" type="text/javascript"></script>
To see the script in action: I used this code to generate the latest “Aid News” updates on The Other World News.
Create an RSS feed for any website: Feedity
How about websites which don’t have an RSS feed? No panic, Feedity comes to your rescue. Their basic (free) service will generate an RSS feed out of any website. The only thing you need to do, is to jug in a URL for any website, refine which items you typically would like to include in the feed, and Feedity does its job.
As an example, let’s do something really interesting. Let’s create an RSS feed with the latest sites which link to The Road to the Horizon, one of my blogs.
The Google URL to search for in-bound links to this blog is:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22www.theroadtothehorizon.org%22+-site:theroadtothehorizon.org
When we feed this URL into Feedity and hit “Preview”, we don’t get much:
…but you have to “teach” Feedity what items on the page to look for before it can convert webcontent into an RSS feed: Use the “Simple Refine” drop down menu to select an example of what you are looking for, hit “Refine” and.. voila:
Hit “Get Feed” and you are done. In the example of the above case, the URL for the feed generated from this Google site search is:
http://feedity.com/rss.aspx/google-com/UlVQU1Bb
..which generates this result:
Now please tell me this is pretty neat?!
Feedity lets you define up to 10 RSS feeds for free, updated 5 times per day, and displaying a maximum of 10 items. If you want more, you’ll have to pay. Nonprofits, bloggers and humanitarian organisations get a significant discount.
RSS tools for all needs: xFruits
Moving on from geeky to geekier: xFruits offers a 11 sophisticated RSS manipulation tools for free:
- Aggregate several RSS feeds into one
- Generate an HTML webpage out of your RSS feed
- Generate an HTML webpage suited for mobile users out of your RSS feed
- Generate an RSS feed from Emails anyone sends to your xFruits Email account, or from the unread emails in your Email box
- Create a PDF from any RSS feed
- Generate an Email with the updates of any RSS feed
- Convert RSS to OPML, and create a webpage compatible with mobile devices from your OPML
- Publish your RSS feed on the most popular blog platforms, using their APIs
- And last but not least, convert your RSS feed to Podcasts…
Let’s just take the last one to illustrate the power of RSS feeds. Let’s take the feed from Have Impact !, our micro finance project and run it through the RSS-to-Voice function. The web output looks like this:
It looks like my original RSS feed, but a podcast icon is added before every post. Give it a try and listen to the quality of the spoken voice. Good, hey?
Check out how the same RSS feed looks and sounds like in the Podcast output and mobile output.
The ultimate RSS tools: Yahoo Pipes
And going geekier. The geekiest of them RSS tools must be Yahoo Pipes. Pipes can do just about anything you want with an RSS feed. It can aggregate, edit, manipulate and mix RSS with content at your free will.
I use Yahoo Pipes a lot for Humanitarian News, which aggregates content from 600+ different sites. The technique, I described in an earlier post: Each feed is filtered for lousy formatting, non ASCII characters, mixed with other similar feeds, sorted, truncated and output as a new feed which is imported into my news aggregator.
Yahoo Pipes is for free, supported by an active user forum, but definitively not for those faint of heart: “super geeks domain!”
And more RSS tools: rss-tools.com
And if you hadn’t enough yet, check out The RSS Tools Directory. If you can’t find an RSS tool there, it probably does not exist.
Icon courtesy of Insic Designs
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Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
Thanks for the tip. Seeing the small numbers in Google analytics, i was thinking about removing the retweet button.
BTW, considering the enormous amount of you follow i follow crowd in the twitter, would people care to click those links
I don’t know if your retweet button shortens the URL with bit.ly, but -as described in this post- that could give you a black and white figure on the traffic the tweets give.
I do, on my links and have been astonished by the amount of traffic each tweet gives.
It is true there is a “scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” mentality in the following in Twitter, but not so much in retweeting. At least not in the social community I have created around each of my Twitter accounts.
And maybe that is key in all of it: ensure the quality of your followers. Maybe one tip: I *never* autofollow. This means that “my” social community would never follow me, simply because I would follow back.
I’d like to say they follow my tweets, because they like the content
Hope that helps a bit,
Peter
I have just discovered your site via ICT-KM, and it will keep me busy for hours…. I have been blogging for a few months now, we are one of the NGOs who want to use social media more and are still finding out how best to do that (ILEIA, see http://www.leisa.info). So your site is full of useful stuff (so far I’d only found social media for marketing your business).. thanks and keep up the good work!
Karen
While these sites may be free for us, the end user, google and yahoo take the numbers we provide for them, and they scan the content we enter on their services, and use it as fodder to sell their profitable products, such as adwords.
It is in their interest to keep these sites working well, as the critical mass we provide is the very product they can leverage to advertisers.
That being said, Michael Keizer is correct- if the service is mission critical, buy the pro account, and get on the line with their support if needed.
Do you know of an alternative to Pipes?
@Hank:
Don’t think there is any pro-account formula for Yahoo Pipes unfortunately. The only alternative I found is http://pipes.deri.org/ but looks even more of a hackers tool, and I don’t know how well it performs.
I think I will make my own…
Peter.
i just love to Twitter everyday with my friends. Twitter is much better than blogging in my opinion and it is very addictive too.
. ..
thank you for this good information
nice post . Very helpful information. Thank you.
Hi, this blog post is very well-written and appears extremely useful. But I was just wondering if you could clear something up? You mention Newsgator as a product, but the link to their website shows Newsgator is a company with a lot of products – it isn’t clear which tool or product you used to amalgamate feeds and produce script. Could you explain this step in some more detail?
If you post here please email me to let me know
Many thanks
Jez
Hi Jez,
You are totally correct. Newsgator changed their services end August. The online aggregator functions they used to have is no longer available.
If you are looking for a feed aggregator or RSS-to-script function, have a look at this post:
http://www.blogtips.org/free-rss-tools/
best,
Peter
i think the problem is solved now..
Yahoo Pipes went back up after almost 3 weeks of intermittent problems. There are still problems saving new or modified Pipes, though. That problem exists since at least 2 months….
Peter, thank you for including us in your review. I am happy you like the Dlvr.it service. Stay tuned. LOTS of good things coming. Including many more outputs – Facebook coming very soon.
Also, thanks for the feedback on the stats. In order to “provide interesting statistics,” mash the data and provide some real intelligence we use the Dlvr.it short URL. It makes the data consistent and allows us to do some interesting analysis – lots of things going on in the lab now.
Stay tuned…
Best,
Bill Flitter
Founder, dlvr.it
comprehensive post! Another tools for RSS to twitter is hootsuite, I havent tried it out.. but it gives the feature.
I just discovered Hootsuite’s RSS-to-Twitter function. Will try it out, and update the post.
Thanks for the reminder.
Peter
I agree I think social media is really more important for better communicating with your supporters and building a strong foundation and network of people interested in your cause.
These tips are great. Thanks for sharing.
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