Useful internet software, websites and blogsites.: Two Online Services To Clean Up Your RSS Feeds

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Two Online Services To Clean Up Your RSS Feeds

via MakeUseOf.com by T.J. Mininday on 3/18/09

As I've said in the past, RSS feeds and web syndication have become the de facto standard of delivering new content to the world. Whether it's on a blog, a news site, a social network or a podcast, it doesn't appear that there is anything that can't be converted into an RSS feed of some kind these days. The delivery of the content is one thing, but how users will receive it is what is important to us and to our readers.

We've written about several options in the past, and will probably continue to do so as long as RSS stands at where it is today. And although readers are likely the most important tool, the reader doesn't do a whole lot of good if they are receiving loads of unwanted content. Having the ability to filter content to your own personal keywords would be an ultimate resource and would ultimately clean-up all of your feeds, just the way you'd like.

FeedWeaver

Feedweaver is a simple RSS customizing tool for any feed that you specify. After you sign-up, you can immediately begin entering in any feeds (up to 20) that you like with any filtering keywords you'd like.

All of these feeds are then combined into just ONE feed that you can share for yourself or anyone else. The concept, although not that involved, does what it's designed to do perfectly.

In the screenshot below you can see several of Feedweaver's demo customizations. From here, you can go in and modify at will. If you'd like to take a look at the demo yourself, just go to the site and enter "demo" for the username and "1234″ for the password.

Feed Rinse

Feed Rinse is an RSS spam filter of sorts. Their completely free service allows for the import of an OPML file from your reader of choice, followed by simple keyword filtering for any specific topics that are to your liking. After your keywords are entered, Feed Rinse does the rest and creates a new OPML file for you to import back into your reader.

You can also set up a bookmarklet for automatically import any valid RSS feed into a customized file. This makes for easy addition to the filters.

Below is a look at how easy it is to get your keywords set up for your specific feeds that you've imported.

Feedscrub is another service that is still in private beta, but looks very similar in nature to the previous tools that I've described.

When I stumbled upon these two simple and highly useful online tools, I realized that I had in no way ever thought of the concept. But now that I have, I am definitely going to be taking full advantage of them. The thousands of junk posts and articles that I have to sift through on a daily basis can be a bit daunting when 75% of them are in fact what I'm describing. I can now get what I want from where I want in real-time.

Do you forsee filtering your feeds like this? How much of your RSS feeds are purely "junk"?

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