How to Filter out Undesirable Posts in your RSS Reader

There are certain people in the world whom I detest intensely. When I hear of these people, I get really irritated and bad-tempered. People such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton for example. I am getting more and more annoyed with the ongoing media drama of Britney in the hospital or Paris flaunting herself wherever there is a camera.

So whenever they popped up in my RSS reader, I would be hitting the delete button rather aggressively. After writing about how to block undesirables from your Google News page, I then decided to see if there was any way to block them entirely from ever appearing in my RSS reader again - and there IS! It’s called Feed Rinse. Hallelujah.

Feed Rinse is basically a spam filter for RSS feeds. It takes your feeds and then filters them, depending on the rules you specify. You can tell it to allow or block posts depending on keywords in the post body or post title. It will then give you a special Feed Rinse RSS address which you can then place in your RSS reader - and it’s all free!

You can use this service to exclude people you don’t want to hear about or exclude certain subjects that you are not interested in. Or maybe you don’t want the posts from a certain blog author to show up in your RSS reader?

So let’s start. After creating your account, you are faced with this :

You can, if you wish, create a channel if you plan to have different categories of feeds. But I just wanted to rinse away Britney and Paris from my CNN news feed so I just clicked on “Add Feeds”.

You then have to enter the RSS feed you want rinsed in the box provided and press “import”

If the RSS address is successfully accepted, then you will see it on the page under “Your Feeds” :

You then have to click on the “set up rules” button on the right hand side to start specifying what you want terminated :

Try and choose unique keywords that will block the right posts. If you are too vague, then you may end up losing posts that you would want to actually read. Remember to save all your changes.

When everything has been configured the way you want it, it’s then time to get your modified feed to put back into your RSS reader. Just click on “Get Your Rinsed Feeds” and then “Export Feeds”. An OPML file will then be downloaded to your computer and you then have to use the “import” function in your RSS reader to upload the OPML file.

Once your RSS reader accepts the OPML file, you will then see your feed again - but modified to exclude what you told it to exclude.

Ah…..no more stories about Britney freaking out or Paris crashing her car. Absolute bliss!

If you found this article useful then please help us spread the word by Stumbling It.

If you like this article then subscribe to MakeUseOf feed and get latest articles delivered to your Feedreader. If you want to recieve latest articles in your email click here. It's FREE!