Tubejumper » Idea

Search Keyword OPML Generator

shawn — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:17:36 +0000

There are a number of search engines that are exposing their results as RSS feeds. From this I had an idea and built a little app at work that collected RSS posts from about 40+ search engines to help track brands across the internet. It occurred to me that others might want to do the same thing so I decided on building a quick and dirty opml generator that people could use in their feed reader. Give it a try at http://punchingsoup.com/.

Bundling

shawn — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:37:48 +0000

I’m about half way through setting up a new feature called bundles on my rss reader. I’ve found that following rss via tags is a pretty good way to go but sometimes I’m doing research on an overarching topic and I need a something to bring it all together.

As it stands now a bundle is a group of tags and feeds that have some common focus. I’ve got one for mobile that includes feeds from wapreview, MobileCrunch, SMS Text News and a few others, plus the tags: mobile, phone, verizon, sprint, tmobile, sms, smartphone and a few others. This way I can follow the mobile industry not just via mobile focused blogs, but also articles that are tagged with a mobile focus.

As long as the bundles stay under 50 articles a river style reading will do fine. If the bundles consistantly have more the 50 articles then I may have to include a secondary grouping structure probably in the form of a tag cloud.

RSS Fatigue

shawn — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 01:47:52 +0000

I started to get RSS Fatigue at the end of summer ‘07 and knew I needed to do something about it. I’ve had some pretty good RSS management strategies and I was using Newsgator which fit my reading style. I had my feeds setup into folders based on content and priority. I had one group for VC bloggers, a tech group with subgroups for gadgets and such. Everything was going fine and I was able to keep on top of my rss feed reading. Then I started to fall behind.

The first thing I did was try to purge a few feeds. I tossed Gizmodo for Engadget mainly because they had very similar articles and I used a feed combiner for Engadget and EngadgetMobile feeds to eliminate dups. That made things better for a bit but I think there has been an increase in the number of posts per blog and I was wasting time on articles about the same thing. Every blog seemed to have posts like this, "How [iphone/facebook/google thing] affected the industry this blog is about.". Even feeds that weren’t gadget or mobile related had a few posts about the iphone.

One thing I didn’t try was to filter my rss feeds. I really didn’t feel like that was the solution for me since I thought that I might miss something. I could handle not reading some of the less important posts later but I didn’t think most blogs have or would put out two feeds one for important articles and the other for filler articles. I also didn’t stop reading my feeds as some have suggested.

Then it hit me one day that looking at the articles feed by feed was the problem. I needed a different way to organize them and put them in front of me so that the important stuff to me and the biggest news items bubble up to the top. So I built myself a feed reader and a database to store them in. Then I attached it to another project I was working on to manage my mp3 and picture collection. First thing I did was build a duplicate of Newsgator since that was what I had been using, I figured that was a good place to start.

Not an exact duplicate of Newsgator but it was a start.