I have been using a couple of Firefox browser extensions (Sage and Wizz RSS) to manage my RSS feeds for some time. Both are fine feed readers, but I still find myself using standard bookmarks in Firefox and simply visiting my favorite blogs as I have time. However, this list of favorites has grown to a point that a better system is definitely required. I thought about having another go at Sage or some other browser-based solution, but ultimately decided a web-based alternative might make more sense. How I ended up choosing Bloglines, I’m not really sure - I was also looking at NewsGator - but the setup was easy and fairly intuitive, and a short while later I had all of my bookmarked blogs neatly organized as feeds.

Will Bloglines give me any relief from the information overload I deal with every day? Probably not. But, at least I can see what I’m missing and then click ‘Mark All Read’.

I have been experimenting with various methods and plugins for embedding RSS feeds into blog posts. Not surprisingly, there are a number of ways to accomplish this and plenty of plugins and widgets to help. At some point, I would like to hack together my own scripts for doing this, but for now I am relying on the efforts of others. One such application is FirstRSS, a nifty RSS aggregator plugin for Wordpress developed by Chris Hatcher. Ultimately, it was his solution that I preferred as it was the cleanest and simplest to use. It also comes packaged with ‘SideRSS’, a script for embedding RSS feeds into a sidebar/template that is just as easy to use. FirstRSS and SideRSS are offered under open source GPL and would make an excellent starting point for anyone looking to build their own RSS aggregator. Continue Reading »

Craig Babcock
craig.babcock@gmail.com

Bitty Browser - an embeddable functional ‘browser’ that can render web pages, podcasts, RSS feeds and OPML.

Grazr - an amazing widget building platform that supports RSS, RDF, Atom and OPML outlines. It also features its own procedural scripting language based on JavaScript called GrazrScript.

Feel free to suggest relevant links in the comment section below.

Digital Point - XML & RSS Forum

RSS-Specifications

Feel free to suggest relevant links in the comment section below.

I tend to accumulate a great number of links when I do research - certainly too many to list in the sidebar of this blog. So, instead I will do my best to organize my links here under corresponding subheadings (as sub-pages). I’ll keep it simple at first, but will probably attempt to make the list dynamic at some point.