Fun with RSS!

In case you didn't notice I got my news feed working again. For some reason the site that was hosting the feed for me deleted it (?) I went back and signed up again after getting no response to an e-mail requesting support. After I set it back up it worked like gangbusters. The site I use to generate my consolidated news feed is WebRSS. It is a bit klugey and the support seems non-existent but it served its purpose.

The reason I went looking for it in the first place was because of the (are you listening Google?) crappy RSS module in Blogger. The main problem is that it only allows you to display the top 5 items from the feed. That's OK if it is just a single feed with just a few items daily but I was trying to feed the contents of my Google Reader Shared Items into a module. The Blogger module was just not going to do the trick. I looked around on the internet for a way to generate some javascript to display more of the feed, because Blogger does let you plug in JS modules from third parties. I found several that worked, but only partially. WebRSS was the only one that worked for me fully at the time. I will keep an eye on it because I don't trust it completely.

The good news is I found another site that will probably do just as well. I found it while I was trying to figure out how to do a consolidated feed of the podcasts I like. The problem I had was that Google reader was allowing me to consolidate my news into a single feed based on the items I selected to share, which (are you listening Google?) is an AWESOME feature of Google Reader. I found the FeedDigest site which is just what the Doctor ordered. It allows you (after a free sign up) to consolidate multiple feeds into one and will also generate the Javascript (or other methods) needed to embed the consolidated feed into your blog or web page. The only thing that the Google Reader feed has over it is that with Reader you can control your feed manually. With the Podcasts it's not a big deal since there are so much fewer of them.

So as you can see, I love RSS! If you aren't all that familiar with RSS you really should take a look at it. Most sites have RSS feeds nowadays and when you get them all consolidated in a reader like Google's you can check out a lot of your favorite blogs and news sites without as much time spent surfing around. I know there are other online readers besides Google's as well as stand alone (downloadable) RSS readers. I have personally used the Snarfer reader, and although it had some bugs it was generally OK -- and free. I was forced by circumstances beyond my control to migrate to an online reader and picked Google because I already had the blog here. The features of Reader have been a pleasant surprise and have inspired me to inflict this RSS madness (look to the right) on everyone who comes into contact with the Bloggy here.

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