Rourke on Technology

Do you want a way to merge or aggregate multiple feeds into one master feed? Do you want to filter a feed or set of feeds and scan for entries that either contain (or don’t contain) a particular item? Then FeedShake is for you. Do you want to make sure you don’t miss any items published to an active feed? Then feedcatch is for you. Do you want to know why the heck either of those things is useful? Then this blog post is for you.

Collections of low traffic feeds: Quite a few of my friends publish photos to online galleries, and each of these galleries has a feed. The problem is that these are all very low traffic feeds. If you add feeds like this to My Yahoo!, they take up quite a bit of room and mostly contain links that are very old. Sure, you can set My Yahoo! to only show items newer than a week, but that way you end up with a long list of empty topics. Unsightly, and still too real-estate intensive. The same holds true for the long list of very low volume blogs my friends maintain. But… if you add all those feeds as one merged, FeedShake feed you end up with something like what you see to the right. Much easier on the eyes.

Creating a master feed like this also allows me to maintain these master feeds in one place and then subscribe to that feed in a number of different places. If, for example, my wife has a subscription to our friends’ photo galleries it will automatically get updated whenever I update the master subscription.

I treat Flikr feeds a little differently because they publish each and every photo as a separate item (Smugmug, on the other hand, publishes new albums as a single entry). Flikr provides a way to subscribe to a unified feed for all of your friends in My Yahoo!, so there’s no need for FeedShake here, right? Interestingly, creating my own unified field for Flikr contacts ended up getting me more items and much less wasted space than using the built-in Flikr functionality. In the relevant screenshot to the left, the Flikr feed is the longer one with more wasted space to the right of the FeedShake feed.

Unified personal feed: Quite a few people I know have a number of different feeds. At minimum, it seems like everyone has a blog feed and a photo feed of some sort. In addition, many folks also have del.icio.us bookmark feeds, music feeds, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily splice all these feeds together into one merged feed that friends could easily subscribe to? FeedShare will let you do that.

Monitoring feeds for keywords: FeedDemon users know all about this. Using Watches in FeedDemon you can easily monitor one or all of your feeds for keywords and get alerted when matches occur. I use this to monitor posts in online bulletin boards for messages of particular interest. The problem is that (1) you can only do this if you’re paying for FeedDemon and (2) it only works when you’re sitting at your computer. Now, with FeedShake I can do this in a more configurable way online and make it available in Google Reader or via a feed to email service to insure I don’t miss a match.

Insure you don’t miss any feed items: Most feeds don’t keep more than the newest 15 to 20 items in the feed at any given time. If you’re using one of the online feed readers, chances are they it won’t keep anything older than what is still available in the feed. This is fine if you’re subscribed a blog like this, where I normally don’t post more than two items in a given week. But, if you’re subscribed to a really busy feed and they push 30 items in a day or two then you’re only going to see the last 20 or so. Flikr is a perfect example of this. Often folks will post a whole mess of pictures (think 40+), but if you’re subscribed via the normal feeds it looks to you like they’ve only published 15 at a time. Feedcatch will monitor the feed constantly and keep all of the items for you. This way you never miss an item.

Summary: FeedShake and feedcatch are interesting new services that open up quite a few potential feed related mashups. Neither is a refined product yet, so don’t expect a clean or seamless experience. The UI for FeedShake is awful — you enter all the feeds you want to combine in a single small text field with spaces between each url. There also seems to be inconsistent truncation of feeds. My “Friends’ Blogs” feed shows full entries, while my attempt at a unified feed for myself resulted in truncated entries and a corrupt RSS 2.0 feed. Expect both services to improve with some time and as people start to use them more and more.