Create RSS Feed Newspapers

Computers are really nice for information gathering but nothing beats reading a book or newspaper on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee at a breakfast table. That’s probably what the developers of Feed Journal thought as well because they have developed an application that transforms RSS feeds into a newspaper format which can then be printed and read offline.

After setting up an account at Feed Journal you can start adding the RSS feeds that should be included in your personalized newspaper. A maximum number of eight articles per RSS feed can be included in each newspaper that you create. Rather unfortunate is the fact that only the eight latest articles are displayed which means that you can’t create a newspaper with all the interesting articles of the last week because those are not available anymore.

You could however print one daily to cover all articles. Users can change some settings of the newspaper at account setup, namely the format of the newspaper which is by default A4, the number of columns and the margin.

The results are pretty nice but I’m missing some options that would enhance the usability. First, I would like to see a way to add a number of feeds at once. You can only add one feed at a time currently which is not that user friendly if you want to add ten or even fifty feeds. A way to import feeds from an opml would be welcome.

The second option that I would like to see is to be able to pick more articles from a website. The current limit of eight articles does not even come close the the daily amount of articles published at sites like Techcrunch or Lifehacker.

Feed Journal offers a unique promising idea. Blog owners can offer their readers a personalized newspaper, the basic account is free which has however several limits.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday February 20, 2008 -
Tags:feed journal, feed-reader, feeds, newspaper, rss feed

Responses so far:

1. Stefan says:

   February 20, 2008 at 2:16 pm

   Nice Idea, and the given example by the authors looks real nice (and reads real nice either.. surprisingly nice, considering the non-printed medium).

   But the limitations are kinda hard to cope with. I guess I’ll do some testing, print for a week or so my daily newspaper, hope that I don’t miss any and leave it alone afterwards to wait for Version 2.0 ;)

   Reply
2. Jawwad says:

   February 20, 2008 at 4:27 pm

   Martin: Just wondering on one thing that can’t we use the newspaper mode in powerful Feed Demon(it is free now) and simply print it? Not sure about it though.

   Reply
3. Jonas Martinsson says:

   February 20, 2008 at 4:34 pm

   Thank you for your write-up on FeedJournal! I’ll look into adding the options you’re missing in a future rollout.

   Reply