Tuesday, April 28, 2009

More Things On a Stick Thing 30: More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious



I have been signed up for but haven't been using Bloglines as my RSS source since the original 23 Things project. My how the feeds have piled up! There is an option to clear them out and begin anew, but I feel a slight guilt at not at least scanning for some gem. The digital packrat lives.

Thing 30 of More Things has us look at Feedrinse. The idea of this is, as far as I can tell, that you can have it filter out the real nuggets from all those piled up feeds. The three step FeedRinse interface looks simple, but I got a bunch of html code that would not reproduce here.

It makes my eyes pop out of my head to think of it. Obviously somewhere in there I blew past the "get OPML source" stuff because, looking in Bloglines, I didn't see anything that looked to be in code. I tried typing in the web site address and nooo it wouldn't accept it. I found the RSS Feed icon on the page and scooped up the URL from there and noooo it didn't accept that either. All this means is that Feed Rinse looks simple but requires more saavy to "simplify" my RSS experience that I am willing to dig through.

Filter My RSS

This had such a reasonable interface and it appeared to be something doable:

RSS URL
Keywords
Filter On /Description /Title /Category

However...

Warning: fopen(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/books tone/reviews/rss) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found in /homepages/25/d90385819/htdocs/filtermyrss/wp-content/themes/filtermyrss/index.php on line 13
could not receive RSS Feed from server.


Holy encoded nightmare, Batman! I am not interested enough to sort this out.

(Nor, I confess to read the directions when the interface looks like a simple 1,2,3 process. If it is trickier than that, and the common bozoid isn't going to be able to fill in the blanks correctly, then there needs to be explanatory text right up front). I could do it, but when I have so many other ways to view new web site content, and decide for myself what I want to read at any given time, why would I mess with this?

These feed filters have to be useful to people who are responsible for, or who are lunatic enough to want to keep abreast of huge amounts of blogged information and who are looking particularly for specific bits of information.

FeedSifter

I almost didn't look at this one but hey, they are even more bare bones than the first two, but they give examples and explain what is each line is supposed to do.



Agh, doesn't that look like a success at last? Unfortunately when I clicked on "Subscribe to this feed" all I got was an error page. :( :( :(

Yes, even I can deduce I am making a consistent error, but Joan Q. User would do the same. Vindication.




Delicious

I like del.i.cious much more than the RSS feed feeders. It really can be useful to have your favorite web sites bookmarked and accessible from any computer anytime.

Popacular

This lists the most popular sites from del.i.cious from the most recent 8 hours or for all time. If you're looking for sites to browse and bookmark, this will help.

inSuggest

Type in your delicious user name and this suggests more sites like the ones you subscribe to already. Very nice!

I tried following the More Things instruction to search del.i.cious from the brwoser address bar but got page cannot be displayed messages. I copied and pasted their example into the address bar with the same results.

Tag Bundling went much better. Settings/Tags/Edit Tag Bundles allows you to put bookmarked sites together by subject Tag in a group. The more sites and tags you list, the more useful this can be.

I tried looking at the other suggested bookmarking site "FavThumb" but the link goes to "Ebay PicClick". I could not find it via Google either. It appears to have gone *poof*

Tagrolls: A Del.i.cious tool that displays your tags in a cloud.

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