14 “OTHER” Ways to Use RSS Feeds

RSS Tools Undeniably RSS is one of the best things that has happened to the web after email. Not only has it made browsing a lot more productive, convenient, fun … you name it, but it has also introduced a number of new ways to interact with content that we could never have imagined before. While you’re most probably already familiar with the idea of RSS feeds and Feedreader (No? See this video) , there are several other ways you can make use of feeds.

    (1) SendMeRSS – Send RSS feeds to email

    SendMeRSS – Also known as R-mail. If you’re more of an email person and like to follow-up on everything from your email inbox then this is for you. SendMeRSS can take any feed and forward updates to your email. It checks for updates at least once in every two hours so whenever something new gets published it lands in your inbox within at most 2 hours. [All Features].

    (2) MailBucket – Forward Emails to RSS feed

    MailBucket – Ever wanted to forward emails to your feedreader? Enter MailBucket, a simple online app that can generate custom RSS feeds for your emails. The implementation is quite simple, first you need to create a filter in your email program and set it to forward filtered messages to XYZ@mailbucket.org. Next, open your feedreader and following feed: http://mailbucket.org/XYZ.xml (where XYZ can be anything you choose). While it may be neither convenient nor secure to forward all emails to feeds, it certainly makes sense in some cases, i.e. daily reports, newsletters etc. [All Features]

    Send Emails to RSS

    (3) TwitterFeed – Send RSS feeds to Twitter

    TwitterFeed – I have been using Twitterfeed for sometime now and recommend it to everyone. It’s a free service that can be set to track several RSS feeds and send updates to a Twitter account. If you got a blog, you may also consider setting up a separate Twitter account for your blog and ‘twit’ all your blog feeds so that other Twitter users can “follow” it. We have one for MUO as well, you can check it out here.

    Send Blog Updates to Your Twitter Account

    (4) Pingie – Send RSS feeds to Phone

    Pingie (US only) – Get feed updates as SMS messages. It’s absolutely free and works with any cell phone that can receive standard text messages. Nothing to install or download.

    (5) FeedJournal – Print RSS feeds to PDF

    FeedJournal – Here you can subscribe and convert multiple RSS feeds to an elegant printable newspaper. Just grab your favorite feeds, set preferred layout (i.e. 3- column) and generate a printable newspaper-style document. This is something that would go extremely well with news and lengthy articles.

    (6) Wigitize – Add RSS feeds to your Website

    Wigitize – If you ever need to add some RSS feeds to your website, Widgitize offers a quick and simple way to do that. Unlike other similar services, Wigitize gives you a really light and plain widget that you can style yourself.

    Turn RSS Feeds to Embeddable Blog Widgets

    (7) ReminderFeed – Send Reminders to Feedreader

    ReminderFeed – Quick and simple way to schedule one-time or recurrent reminders to your feed reader. Just fill-in the reminder form, set start and end dates, and press “˜create’ button to generate custom feed for your reminder.

    (8) TagMindr

    TagMindr – Another tool to schedule RSS reminders. More than anything else, Tagmindr offers a simple way to remind yourself of webpages or some images you find while browsing the web. Once it’s set you willl be able to easily remind yourself of a link or image that gets bookmarked in your Delicious, Twitter, Flickr or Magnolia accounts. See how it works.

    (9) FeedBlendr – Merge RSS feeds

    FeedBlendr / FeeDoor – Combine muliple RSS and Atom feeds into one. You can even merge video and audio feeds (such as podcasts) with text feeds.

    (10) FeedCrier – Send RSS feeds to IM

    FeedCrier – Receive feed updates in your chat program. Feedcrier supports AIM , MSN Messenger, Jabber and Google Talk clients.

    (11) ZapTXT – Monitor feeds for Keywords

    ZapTXT – ZapTXT enables you to monitor RSS feeds for specific keywords and get alerts as soon as there is a new article that includes specified keywords. Alerts can be set to be delivered to email, instant messaging program or mobile phone.

    ZapTXT - Filter RSS feeds and Get them delivered to Your email or IM client

    (12) SpokenText – Convert RSS feeds to Speech

    SpokenText – Automatically convert RSS news feeds to speech and subscribe to them as podcasts (via iTunes). You can also download your recordings as an mp3 file.

    (13) RSSMixer – Combine RSS feeds

    RSSMixer – This nifty tool lets you combine multiple feeds into one master feed and make it accessible via a regular feedreader, iPhone or Apple Dashboard. No-registration requied, simply enter the feeds you want to combine and click “Mix”. Next you will be prompted with a page where you can chose how you want to access it.

    (14) AideRSS – Filter RSS Feeds

    AideRSS – If you’re subscribed to dozens of popular sources and are having difficulties keeping up with feeds, then AideRSS is for you. Basically, it can take your current subscription list and filter out less popular stories leaving only the BUZZ. Please note, the best way to use it would be on multiple popular sources which publish more than 10-15 stoies per day (Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable etc.)

Did we miss anything ? Let us know in comments.

Did you find this useful? Share it with others

Aibek Esengulov

The guy behind MakeUseOf.com. Follow him and MakeUseOf on Twitter @MakeUseOf. For more details check out MakeUseOf about page.

The comments were closed because the article is more than 180 days old.

If you have any questions related to stuff mentioned in the article or need help with any computer issue, just ask it on MakeUseOf Answers.

Hide 86 Comments

  • Anthony February 22, 2008

    Wow, that’s at least three new services I’d never heard of until now. You should probably include FeedDemon as well, http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon/.

    • Aibek February 23, 2008

      FeedDemon is a great program, the reason I didn’t list it here because it’s just a feedreader and not really something users don’t know about.

  • Jerry February 22, 2008

    Organize all your feeds with pageflakes.

  • Israel February 23, 2008

    Have you seen http://www.Freealert.org? It’s an RSS search tool that allows you to search for keywords and key items you’re looking for on Craigslist RSS feeds worldwide. It’s free and it lets you search for up to 5 keywords for free stuff!

  • Dave Drager February 23, 2008

    Twitterfeed is a service I was just looking for – to send weather alerts to Twitter. Great links!

    • Aibek February 23, 2008

      Good idea :-)

  • Beau February 23, 2008

    Hey, thanks for the post about FeedBlendr! I’m the developer of it, and just thought I’d let you know that you can actually blend podcasts and all sorts of other media-oriented feeds in FeedBlendr and it will handle them properly (unlike a lot of other tools out there).

    People have used it for handling GeoRSS, MediaRSS, podcasts, iTunes podcast feeds, plus all sorts of other things!

    Cheers,

    Beau

    • Aibek February 23, 2008

      My bad, for some reason I thought FeedBlendr only handles text feeds. Thanks for heads up, I have corrected the text.

  • Mamod February 23, 2008

    Thank you Aibek for featuring my feed service feedoor.com in this post, it’s really a great opportunity to introduce new users to feedoor especially before releasing the next version of it.

    To be short, Feedoor new version will have a new API and a new way to mix feeds and single items with new themes.

    Thanks again, this a great post “of course I will say this” :)

    Regards,
    Mamod

    • Aibek March 10, 2008

      You’re welcome ;-)

  • Richie Cunningham February 24, 2008

    you missed yahoo pipes – mashup your feeds

  • Brent February 24, 2008

    I really like xFruits a lot too. I use it to archive my delicious bookmarks to gmail and then it’s all searchable in one place.

  • Wibbler February 25, 2008

    What about http://nouri.sh ? It turns a feed into an automated newsletter…

  • Charles Wilson February 26, 2008

    Pretty decent list of things we can do with feeds. End of the day, we still need to process them. Read them and act upon them.

    Guess I still like to read my feeds on my personal netvibes page.

  • Syahid A. March 2, 2008

    Awesome list Aibek. I really love to use AideRSS – the algorithm used to identify quality posts is working quite nicely for me.

  • Mike P March 8, 2008

    Another vote for netvibes.com. It’s a great way to organize and read rss feeds.

  • Matt March 8, 2008

    Some friends and I recently launched a service to send RSS/ATOM feeds to your mobile via MMS, allowing you to get more of the story and even any attached images. Give it a try over here and let us know what you think! http://feeds.fastbreakmobile.com/addfeed

    • Aibek March 10, 2008

      Thanks Matt, will definitely check it out.

  • jay March 8, 2008

    i’ve been using feedeachother.com for quite a while, it’s a great social networked feed reader, as social (or not) as you want it to be

  • JAe March 9, 2008

    Yeah. How you could have a list like this and not include netvibes is beyond me.

    • Aibek March 10, 2008

      Netvibes is a great service and the reason it’s not included because this post was not meant to be about RSS readers (or startpages for that matter) but “other” ways to make use of feeds.

  • Paul March 9, 2008

    I’ve been using Serence Klipfolio for years — I haven’t found anything to beat it yet.

  • Dana Ross March 9, 2008

    I use http://my.yahoo.com to organize all my feeds. Great pages. It handles photo feeds from Smugmug, Google Albums and Flickr too. Awesome.

  • Michael March 9, 2008

    I do all my RSS reading on my Blackberry during my public transportation commute each day. I searched quite a long time for a good mobile RSS reader. I ended up with FreeRange (http://www.freerangeinc.com). It’s not free, but I’ve been using it for the last 6 months and it’s been worth every penny. It integrates with your Google RSS feeds and does a great job of it. I love the ability to seamlessly send an RSS feed item to myself or anyone else in my Blackberry contact list with just a few clicks. Unless I can find something for free that does what this does, I’ll be sticking with FreeRange.

  • sponge888 March 9, 2008

    netvibes netvibes netvibes netvibes

    :-)

  • kniffler March 9, 2008

    Yahoo Pipes, seriously.

  • sergio March 10, 2008

    i am back to using newspipe again.. seems to be less intrusive, and take less effort that google reader:

    http://newspipe.sourceforge.net/

  • evozero March 10, 2008

    what about RSS Ticker? I use it everyday and randomnise the feed items for variety

  • cassiel March 19, 2008

    Feedity.com turns a page without RSS-Feed into one.

  • Emma Snow April 6, 2008

    FeedForAll has some cool PHP scripts for manipulating, merging and filtering RSS feeds – http://www.feedforall.com/scripts-directory.htm

    Worth a mention!

  • rgh_rattler August 29, 2008

    Great!! That was helpful!!

  • Oliver Simon October 18, 2008

    Hi
    you missed websnips which lets you make widgets out of any site.

    thanks

  • Oliver Simon October 20, 2008

    its WebSnips you can make a widget out of any site.

  • Csaba January 27, 2009

    Good row!
    By the way, is there any reason, why you did not mentioned dapper? http://www.dapper.com

  • Benoa June 16, 2009

    http://feedmyinbox.com is pretty slick too. I use it for many feeds, it’s fast and easy. A must-use!

  • TopGear December 6, 2009

    Thanks for the tips :)