FeedStitch offers multiple third-party ways of logging into the service including using Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Open ID and AOL. Once logged in it is possible to paste RSS feed urls into the form to add them into groups. Groups are made up of multiple RSS news feeds and other news sources and provide access to a single RSS news feed url or Json item.

The other news sources that can be added in addition to news feeds are Twitter (either by username or Twitter search), Flickr, Delicious, Github and Tumblr. A new url is created for each new group that gets created by the user. Each group can be accessed directly in the web browser or in a feed reader. It is also possible to customize the url in the form http://feedstitch.com/groupname/.

FeedStitch is a nice service for users who want to quickly combine multiple RSS feeds into one especially if they have an account at one of the services that can be used to log into FeedStitch.

Related posts

• Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In Wordpress (1)
• RSS Feed Filter Feedrinse (3)
• Google Reader News Aggregator (0)
• Forward Email To RSS (14)
• FeedDemon 3 Released (1)

Usage is pretty simple. The basic rule is to simply append /feed/ to the url to access the RSS feed of the category, tag or author. To give you an example. Jack started posting about Linux today at Ghacks. If you wanted to subscribe to his Linux articles you could do it the following ways:

Subscribe to the Linux category, tag or the author.

This method is not unique to Ghacks. It is the native way how Wordpress handles feeds. You can use it on any standalone Wordpress blog as long as they are not catching all feed requests and sending them to a feed processor like Feedburner. (I disabled the feed fetcher plugin to make the custom feeds work)

Related posts

• Combine RSS News With FeedStitch (5)
• RSS Feed Filter Feedrinse (3)
• Netvibes Feed Problem (0)
• Monitor Your RSS Feed With CopyGator (2)
• Google Reader News Aggregator (0)

The service that I’m using to create custom RSS News Feeds is called Dapper. Dapper can do much more than merely creating a RSS News Feed but that is what I want to concentrate on.

The example that I’m going to use is a RSS News Feed for software updates at Nirsoft, one of the most popular software programmers out there who is not offering an RSS News Feed. We start by loading the Dapper website.

Enter a term that is describing the project, for example Nirsoft and click on the button Create a New Dapp. You could also try a search first to see if anyone has already created what you are looking for.

Enter the URL of the Nirsoft website (http://www.nirsoft.net/) and select RSS Feed as the format. A click on Next loads a preview of the Nirsoft main homepage. If you scroll down you see the What’s new section. That’s the section that we want for our RSS Feed.

That section is only visible on the page we are on. We add that page to the basket. The basket is used for analyzing page contents. Adding additional pages helps the application to determine the contents of the pages which is only possible if a website contains pages that look similar but offer different content, for instance a Google search for two different search terms.

We only have on page that gets added to the basket. A click on Next Step and OK loads the page where we make the selection of the contents that we want to show up in our RSS News Feed. If you move the cursor around in that preview window you notice the rectangle that encloses elements on that page. This is being used to select the contents we need.

Scroll down and pick the Date in the What’s new section. A click on one date should mark all dates yellow. This shows you that the application has identified the dates correctly. You need to make sure that only the dates are marked on that page. If you scroll up you see that the main menu was also selected. A click on one entry there removes it again.

If you scroll down again you see that most dates have also been unmarked. To change that click on the second date which should again mark all dates and nothing else. You can check the Preview Selected Content section at the bottom to check if only the dates have been selected.

A click on Save Field will save those information, select Date as the name and the Date Published checkbox. We got the date but we need additional information because we also want to know what got updated. Each entry contains a link and a name of the application that got updated. That will be our second field.

Just click on the first application and notice that this time everything gets marked correctly. A click on Save Field will let us save that field again, select Name and pick Title from the checkbox.

You should see two fields in the lower right section. A click on Next Step will load a preview of the RSS Feed that we have created. If everything looks ok click on Next Step which will load the final step. You need an account at this point before you can save the newly created RSS News Feed. It’s free and seamlessly integrated in the process.

Now select a name, description and tags for your dapper and save it. A profile page will be loaded in the end that contains the link to the newly created RSS News Feed. It will be previewed on that page as well.

In case you are asking, this link points to the RSS News Feed that I created for the Nirsoft website.

As I mentioned earlier Dapper can do much more. It can provide XML data which can be used in applications. It’s pretty amazing and offers lots of possibilities.

Related posts

• Windows Vista Services Explained (2)
• Windows Services Manager (3)
• Windows Live Wave 3, One Day On… (1)
• Why is nvsvc32.exe running on my system ? (1)
• Subscribe To Categories, Authors Or Tags In Wordpress (1)