The feature that I want to talk about today is the reader’s feed discovery service. This works pretty much the same way that Google Reader provides users with recommendations.

For that you need to click on Tools > Find more feeds in the program interface to launch the Import option. The Import Feeds matching the following topics option is already preselected in the Import dialog. All you need to do know is to enter a topic to find feeds related to that.

You may also want to check the Only Feeds that match my Language option to find only English feeds and non foreign language ones.

Click Next and wait until the results have been populated by the application. This takes a few seconds. Feeds that you have already subscribed to are hidden by default. Each feed is only listed with its name which makes the selection process less straightforward than that of Google Reader (the Google product displays title, description, url, weekly post averages and subscribers on the results page).

You can select one of the suggested elements and click on the Preview button to get a feed preview. This is an important step to avoid adding feeds that are not providing useful information.

The search for Firefox revealed some great sites, like mine for instance, Mozilla Blog or Tweaking with Vishal, but also a lot of sites that most users interested in the topic won’t find useful, like the Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox RSS feed or the Toolbar Cleaner feed. I’m not entirely sure why my site and Vishal’s appeared in the search results as I’m subscribed to both in RSS Owl.

Dupes may appear if a site uses multiple RSS feed links, for instance a direct feed link and one hosted by a feed provider such as Feedburner.

I tested the feed discovery service with other keywords, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Windows 8 and always came up with a few gems that I did not know about or did not subscribe to. Especially the multi-word discovery works excellent and provides excellent results.

You can download RSS Owl from the developer website.

FeedBeater is an online service that can create RSS feeds or email alerts for any webpage on the Internet (that does not require login or is otherwise protected).

In the best case, all you need to do is to visit the FeedBeater website, enter the domain name or page url that you want to receive updates for, and select if you want RSS feed updates or email alerts.

Sometimes though this may not work sufficiently well, for instance if changes are detected that are not of interest or if changes are not detected by the site’s script. You can make use of the advanced options in this case.

Advanced options load a view of the website in the browser. You have two options to configure custom notifications. The first allows you to add keywords that the page should have or not have. The second to specify an area on the web page that is of importance to you. Changes in that area will then be reported while changes to other areas of the site won’t.

Both options can be used to fine tune the notification settings of the RSS feed creation and email alert option.

The advanced option needs to be selected in most cases to make sure that updates are reported correctly. The default parser for instance displayed old posts as RSS feed updates on Ghacks.net. The advanced options allowed me to customize the selection and correct that issue. Users need to be aware that they need to supply an email address to the service if they use the advanced configuration options.

Interested users can check out FeedBeater here. Alternatives are Dapper, Feed43 or Feedity to create RSS feeds.

Are you using another service to create RSS feeds for pages that do not offer one by default?

Update: The FeedBeater service is no longer available. Please use one of the alternatives listed at the end of the article.

By default, you get update notifications whenever a new post has been detected on any website in the listing. Sometimes you may want to get notified as soon as a select feed or type of feed gets updated. This can be done in RSSOwl, and here is how.

Start RSSOwl. You see your feeds and folders on the left and the feed contents on the right in the default layout.

To get notified when a specific feed or feeds in a folder get updated, do the following:

• Right-click the feed or the folder and select Filter News from the context menu.
• This opens the News Filter

You configure a new news filter in two steps. First you select one or multiple matching conditions. The easiest condition is match all, which configures the filter for all news that get posted in a feed or folder. It is possible to customize this, for instance by creating alerts for a specific program or service like Firefox, Opera or Gmail only.

The lower half is where you define the actions. RSSOwl supports two different kinds of notifications. You can show the news in the notifier or play a sound. I could not really get the notifier to work, but the play sound alert worked just fine. It played the selected sound whenever one or multiple new posts where detected in the selected feed or folder.

One of the things that you can do if you want to monitor multiple feeds this way is to assign different sounds to each alert to distinguish between the alerts.

If you want to dive deeper into news filters go here: How To Setup News Filters In RSS Reader RSSOwl

Are you using a Feed news reader? If so, have you configured alerts for specific news, or are you just going with the flow?

I first thought about Yahoo Pipes and using that service to create custom RSS feeds for Google Plus. It should be doable, but it is not something that an inexperienced user would be comfortable working with.

Dapper, which is owned by Yahoo as well, is a streamlined alternative. I’m now going to show you how you can use Dapper to create a Google Plus RSS Feed.

Create Google Plus RSS Feed

Visit the Dapper website and click on the create a new Dapp link once the home page has loaded.

This takes you to the Start screen of the Dapp Factory. Here you need to specify what you want to create. In our case, we want to create an RSS feed. We also need to select a website url that we want to create the RSS feed from. This is the posts page on Google Plus, e.g. https://plus.google.com/115604903045061277330/posts

Click the Next button afterwards. You can close the Demo that is coming up or skip it. You should see a Google Plus posts page on your screen now. Click the Add as Sample button at the top and then on the Next Step button in the left menu bar. Confirm that you only need that one url in the prompt that pops up.

Dapper analyzes the page for a moment and will then display the same page again. You will however notice that your mouse selects elements on the page automatically when you hover over them. You now need to select the items on the page that you want included in the RSS Feed.

Since Google is not displaying dates we have to resort to the content and the posters name. Start by moving the mouse over the name in the Posts area. A click on the name should highlight all post names on the page.

Click Save Field and enter a name for it (e.g. Name). Leave everything else as default and click Save.

Now for the difficult part. Move your mouse over the content area, so that all of the post sans the name, post status and sharing section are included. The easiest position to do that is the lower right corner of the post.

All contents should be displayed in the footer area again. Verify that this is the case and click the Save Field afterwards. Give it a name, like Content, and pick Item Text this time. Click Save afterwards.

Now that we have got our two data fields we can move to the next step. Click Next Step to proceed. You should now see a preview of your new RSS feed on the next page.

Select your content fields at the bottom and save them as a group. This ensures that the program will always pair them up.

You can then save the app. You need an account to do that. Account creation is not complicated and done in less than a minute.

The Use This Dapp module is then used to create the RSS feed. Click the Choose a format pulldown menu and select RSS Feed from the list. A click on Go creates the configuration options.

Here it is then necessary to select the Item Title and Text. Pick the right fields that you have created in the previous steps. You should see a preview of the RSS feed on the same page.

The RSS feed link is displayed as well. Just copy the feed url and paste it into your feed reader

You need to repeat the steps for every Google Plus stream that you want to monitor in your RSS reader. Dapper sometimes had issues displaying the Google Plus pages in their interface.

Update: Google seems to have blocked Dapper actively. Users receive the following message: Access to this site is disabled. Dapper users have been blocked by the content owner of this site. Sorry.

Pokki is app based, which means that users install the main client and then the apps that they want to use. Apps include popular choices like Gmail, Facebook or eBay, but also apps that are more on the geeky side of things. This includes an awesome headlines app that is displaying RSS feed contents, a Google Search bar app to start a search on Google directly from the taskbar or a file uploader.

You install Pokki by selecting one of the featured applications from the Pokki website. This installs the application and the main client on the operating system. The icons are placed directly between the start menu button and the first icons of the taskbar. This takes some getting used to time as it moves all the icons to the right (I have several tabs pinned on the taskbar).

Individual applications are then launched with a single click on their icon. The interface opens up fluently. The headlines app for instance displays a selection of default and custom RSS feeds in its interface. Options are provided to add custom RSS feed links to the application which are then displayed on the left side. Options are then available to display news from all RSS feeds in chronological order or news from one specific RSS feed.

Information like the unread email or news count are displayed on the icons if applicable. A total of 21 different applications can be installed right now. Instructions are provided on the program website on how to build custom applications using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

Pokki’s concept is rather unique and interesting. The developers need to push out new applications to increase the reach of their application. That, and support for Vista and XP seem to be the two important things that need to be addressed. The apps could use tooltips that describe what they do as well.

Don’t get me wrong though. Pokki as it stands is a great program for the Windows operating system. At least a few of the available apps should be useful for the majority of Windows users.

Both options are not really that comfortable, especially if you do not hang out 24/7 on Google Plus. The alternative? You could try a service that turns a stream into an RSS feed.

Google Plus Feed is such a service. It is hosted at Appspot with barely any information, so take it with a grain of salt. Could be gone before you can blink with the eye.

It is fortunately dead easy to create an RSS feed for a Google Plus profile. All you need is the user’s Google profile ID and the url that you have to add it to to create the feed.

Just visit a user’s Google Profile on Google Plus to get the ID. You find it in the web address of that page, it is the only number there. I have highlighted the ID for you in the screenshot below.

The ID is also listed on your stream. Each user name is linking directly to the profile of that user. To get the id right-click on the name and select copy link location.

Now that you have got the ID you need to add it to the following url:

https://plusfeed2.appspot.com/

Just add it at the end and load the page. You get an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your RSS feed reader of choice.

You can repeat the process for additional Google profile RSS feeds if you like. It it likely that Google plans to add RSS capabilities to the profile natively. For now, Plusfeed offers a fast way of creating feeds for Google Profiles.

Update: The Google Plus RSS Feeds service has been shut down by its developer. You find an alternative here: Use Dapper To Create RSS Feeds From Any Page, Including Google Plus Posts

Update 2: Plus Feeds is available under a different url again, you can access it here. Thanks Kim for letting me know about it.

Update 3: The second Plus Feed address has been disabled as well.

One important note to keep in mind is that NewsSquares does not require access to a bunch of information on your computer. The app will utilize information it takes from the information you share on Google and at goo.gl, the company’s link shortener, and ajax.googleapis.com, which is a website related to developer tools for Chrome (so no problem there). This makes it safer than those nasty apps that require access to everything you do simply to keep you updated with the weather or something like that.

To try it out, simply follow this link to the Google app store and download the app onto your computer. Chrome automatically handles the installation behind the curtain, and in seconds the app will be sitting in your browser waiting to be utilized.

Chrome does not technically allow the developers of NewsSquares, a small app company called Rocket-in-Bottle, to create a toolbar launch button for their product, nor do they allow any other app producer to do so. As such, you can access NewsSquares by opening a new tab. You should see the application in the Apps section of the new tab near the top of the content area. To get started, click that button and you should be transported to the setup area.

If you are logged in with your Google account the app will automatically accept that login, although you can tell it to take a different account name and password on the opening screen if you wish. From the primary NewsSquares page, which gives you a preview of its power with default content, click the large +Add button on the left of the screen to begin adding new subscriptions to your “news wall” and getting the content more in line with your interests. A window will then appear that allows you to search through a host of common content options, including a search option to find feeds that NewsSquares does not feature.

As you choose the feeds you want, remember that you have to get in there and remove the default ones you do not. You can do this by clicking the Manage button at the top of that same subscriptions window. Once finished, step back to the news wall and survey what you have created.

NewsSquares does indeed offer more than a traditional RSS news consolidation point. It is easy to see that it is far more attractive visually than most, but clicking on one of your new squares shows even more. As news sites are rarely about simple single news feeds, clicking on each square brings up other news items that appear along the bottom of the screen, providing a handy way to search abbreviated news from your news wall.

There are a lot of RSS consolidation tools out there, and everyone is looking for something different in the one they use. NewsSquares provides a very pretty way to go about sorting through your news feeds in a well-organized and visually appealing way. If you are looking for a new feed reader, it is probably a good one to take for a spin.

Desktop Ticker is a free portable software for Windows that adds a standard ticker to the Windows desktop. This ticker can be configured to display the headlines of a list of RSS feeds that have been added by the user to the program. It is possible to dock the ticker to the top or bottom of the desktop, or place it anywhere else on the screen. The length of the ticker interface can be modified if it is placed in a custom position to suite the needs of the individual user.

Feeds are added with a right-click on the options icon at the left side of the ticker and the selection of File > Manage Feeds.

A new feed is added to the desktop ticker by pasting its url into the url form and clicking the add button afterwards. It is possible to reorder and disable feeds in the same configuration menu. Click ok once you are done adding all the feeds to finish the process.

The feeds are automatically loaded by Desktop Ticker and included in the ticker. It is recommended to check the options on first start. Feeds are updated every 20 minutes by default, which can be changed here. Other interesting options included changing the type of items that should be displayed in the news ticker, and whether the ticker should remain on top of all other windows.

Several theme related options can be changed here as well, from the font size to the general color scheme and the color of new and recent items.

Hovering the mouse over a title displays a preview of the article on the desktop. A click on an item loads the article in the default system browser.

Desktop Ticker is definitely not an RSS feed reader for everyone, as it is necessary to pay attention to the titles to see what’s going on. It can however be interesting for users who want a news ticker at the top or bottom of their screen, for instance to display the latest stock market news or finance news.

Users who are interested in the application can download it as a portable version or installer from the developer website. Desktop Ticker is compatible with all recent versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 to be installed.

Feed Roller is an alternative which we have reviewed earlier.

Depending on how you use Opera, you may have troubles figuring out how to add feeds and import a feed list. The process is actually not as complicated as it may look on first glance, especially if you know what you need to do.

You can add individual feeds directly by clicking on the feed icon in Opera’s address bar when you are on that page. Feeds are automatically added to the Opera Mail module and you can read them in the browser.

If you search for “import RSS feeds Opera” you find some pages with tips. Most recommend an opml to Opera RSS converter, an external script that converts the RSS feed list into an Opera compatible format.

This is no longer necessary. Opera includes everything that you need to import your feed list, and here is how you do that.

Click on the Menu button at the top left of the browser screen. Locate Settings in the context menu, and then the Import and Export menu.

This opens a file browser. All you need to do know is to load an opml file into the browser. All feeds are then processed by Opera and added under Feeds in the Mail module.

For those that do not know, an opml file is basically a text file that contains exported feed information. You can usually create those files in your feed reader of choice under Export. Most feed readers like Google Reader or RSSOwl support this.

The feed reader in Opera is basic and resembles an email client as much as it does a feed reader. It is good for reading a handful of feeds but it does not offer enough controls to manage and read hundreds of feeds.

What’s missing? Filters, preferences (is there a way to change the feed update frequency?), an option to auto-hide or -delete read feeds and a lot more.

The core benefit is there for Opera users who use the web browser as their main browser. They do not need to run an additional program or online service to read feeds, which may outweigh the lack of features in the RSS reader.

I’m subscribed to a few feeds that are published in a language that I do not understand. Many of the links on those sites point to English websites, which is why I have those sites in my feed.

I do not subscribe to many foreign feeds because of the language barrier. Machine translation may help overcome it, but translating feed items manually is not exactly the most comfortable thing to do. I’m going to show you how to create a pipe that translates one or multiple feeds automatically.

Visit the Yahoo Pipes website and log into your Yahoo account there.

Locate the Sources group on the left sidebar and drag & drop the Fetch Feed module to the work area.

Copy and paste a feed that you want translated into the form. Click on the Deprecated link afterwards and drag & drop Babelfish to the work area.

Link Fetch Feed to Babelfish, and Babelfish to Pipe Output. Congratulations, you have just created a pipe that translates the selected feed automatically. That was not difficulty at all, was it?

Here are some advanced options.

You can translate multiple feeds of the same language easily. Just click on the plus icon of the Fetch Feed module and add additional feeds to it.

You then need to click on Operators and drag & drop Sort to the work area. Place the module between Fetch Feed and Babelfish. Select item.PubDate from the sort options and check the output with a click on Pipe Output.

You should now see translations for all feeds that you have added beginning with the newest post.

You can experiment with other operators. Truncate for instance will cut the feed before or after translation so that only the first x characters are delivered in the translated feed.

Click on Save in the upper right corner when you are done and name your pipe. Click the Run Pipe link that appears on the same page after you have saved your pipe. This opens a new page with many different options. You find options to grab the RSS feed at the top.

Just subscribe to that feed in your RSS reader to get the translated feed delivered to your inbox automatically.

It was one of the first blogs that I added to Netvibes, my first RSS reading and management service, and was carried over to Google Reader, the Firefox extension Brief and my current RSS reader RSSOwl.

For the past year or so I have read less and less posts on Lifehacker. I usually only look at the headlines and mark the articles as read. It is not because the authors at Lifehacker produce less content, quite the contrary.

The core reason is my impression that Lifehacker has reduced the tech article output. Now, this may be my impression and I have no idea if this is true or not. What I do see is an increase in mobile and cell phone related contents which seem to have replaced much of the old tech related articles on Lifehacker.

Even worse in my opinion; The tech articles that get posted are often old news, at least for me and users who follow other tech news sites. Lifehacker is not the site anymore that discovers new and exciting applications for desktop operating systems.

Those tech articles are usually rehashes of other site’s findings, often no longer than 150 or so words long.

Maybe that’s life, that the mobile crowd has exploded and that apps and stuff are the new tech news. Don’t get me wrong. There is certainly a market for mobile apps and news, but it is unfortunately not something that I’m interested in.

As a consequence, I have made the decision to remove Lifehacker from my RSS feed. I will still stop by the site occasionally to see what’s going on. Important or interesting tech news on Lifehacker are covered by many sites that I’m subscribed to in my RSS reader, which means that I will still be able to read them.

For me personally, Lifehacker feels a lot like Digg. A site that I once used on a daily basis turned into something that I have little or no interest in anymore.

Are you a Lifehacker regular? What’s your impression then?

Yahoo Pipes offers one of the easiest options to combine multiple feeds into one. You do need a Yahoo account to make use of Yahoo Pipes but that is the only requirement.

Visit the Yahoo Pipes website and log in with your Yahoo account, or create a new account either directly on site, or by connecting via a Facebook or Google account.

Yahoo Pipes basically works by combining elements on the right. You drag and drop elements on the workplace, configure them and combine them to create something.

For combining multiple RSS feeds into one, we need to do the following. Drag and drop the Site Feed module to the workplace and copy paste the first feed url into the form. You can add additional feeds by clicking on the + icon next to url. Repeat the step for all feeds that you want to combine.

You need to click on Operators now in the left sidebar menu to drag and drop sort to the workplace. Now connect Fetch Feed and Sort by clicking on the blue circle below the Fetch Feed module and connecting it to the blue circle on top of the Sort module.

Now click on the blank field on the left side of in ascending order and select item.pubDate to sort all articles that get posted on all sites by publication date.

Connect Sort to Pipe Output and select save at the top to save the new Pipes.

Enter a name for the pipe and select Save. Click the Run Pipe link afterwards at the top of the screen. This opens a new page that lists the output of the pipe. You find links to snag the pipe as an RSS feed on that page.

Just copy and paste that RSS link into your RSS reader of choice. And there you go, you are now subscribed to one feed that combines multiple RSS feeds.

The solution? Gtweet, a service that acts as a proxy between Twitter RSS Feeds and feed readers such as Google Reader. Best of all, Gtweet connects directly to Twitter for the authentication so that the server will never see nor store the Twitter username or password.

All it takes to see the list of personal Twitter feeds is to click the sign in with Twitter button at the start page of the service. An authentication prompt is displayed on first run only, to allow Gtweet access to the information on Twitter.

Gtweet displays a list of available feeds on the next page. Available for free users are the timeline feed that is made up of the logged in user’s messages and messages from friends.

Three premium user feed types are available as well, which are currently beta tested. Users can request a beta invite for temporary free access to the following additional feeds:

• Mentions, which lists all mentions of the user on Twitter in an RSS feed.
• Lists, which is a feed of the user’s Twitter lists
• Searches, which displays the saved Twitter searches in feed form.

Preferences are available to change some formatting options in the feed. Here it is again important to distinguish between free and premium options. Free users can change the title formatting for individual messages and hide personal and / or retweets in the feed.

Premium users on top of that can configure the feeds to display linked images directly in the tweet body and to expand short urls to their actual web addresses.

Gtweet is fully compatible with all RSS readers including Google Reader. It can be used to access a personal Twitter RSS feed directly in those RSS reader. (thanks Roman for the tip)

Tools were developed in recent years to turn partial RSS feeds into full-text feeds. One of the easier to use tools is offered by Five Filters on their website.

A form at the top can be used to submit a new website or feed url to the service. The options available are only there for premium users who have a subscription. Everyone else can simply press the Create Feed button to see a preview of how the full-text feed looks like.

Please note that the free version includes ads at the bottom of the feed. The url on the preview page is the full feed url. Take a look at the preview to decide whether the service has converted the partial feed to a full feed. If it did you can then subscribe to the url of the page in your RSS feed reader.

A bookmarklet is available as well which can be used to convert partial feed items to full feed items on the fly.

To easily transform partial-feeds you encounter (or convert any content on a page into a 1-item feed), drag the link below to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Then whenever you’d like a full-text feed, click the bookmarklet.

The developers have made available their script on their site, so that webmasters can host it on their own servers. This gets rid of the ads at the bottom and the RSS items per feed limitation.

Other tools that promise to convert partial RSS feeds into Full-Text feeds:

• Wizard RSS, simple interface, had problems with some feeds.
• Unsum, this one is an advanced converter. It offers to detect full feeds automatically, but can be configured as well by adding start and end HTML tags that enclose the articles on the site. No limit on feed items delivered, great service.
• Google Reader Preview Enhanced, a userscript that works only when Google Reader is the feed reader used. Developer has stopped development though, look at the comments to make it work with the latest Google Reader version.
• Feedex, suggested in the comments, turns partial feeds into full feeds automatically.

Tech savvy users have additional options, like creating their own construct using Yahoo Pipes. If I had to pick one of the services I’d pick Unsum, because of its customizability.

This button controls the extension’s functionality. A click on it displays the monitored RSS feeds, and an option to scan available feeds. No feeds are monitored in the beginning, and the user’s first task is to click on the available feeds link to subscribe to some feeds.

RSS Live Links will automatically scan all open tabs for RSS feed links to display those as links to the user. It is then possible to subscribe to selected feeds by clicking on them in the interface.

Feeds that are added this way are monitored from that moment on. The extension’s options can be used to add feed urls manually as well, but more about that later on.

The RSS Live Links button will indicate RSS feed updates from that moment on. A left-click on the button displays the monitored feeds. Another click on one of the feeds displays the latest RSS updates of the selected website or service. A short preview is available on mouse over, a click loads the selected page in a new tab in the browser.

Articles that have been selected are marked as read, and options exist to mark all articles as read and to open the feed homepage.

RSS Live Links uses sound notifications in addition to icon animations to notify the user about feed updates. It is possible to disable either one in the options.

RSS Live Links Options

Lets take a closer look at the extensive options.

Display options are configured at the top of the option’s page. Here it is possible to define the maximum height and width of the popup, feed and title formatting options, the maximum number of items per feed or how feeds or items are shown in the popup.

Groups can be configured as well. This is helpful for users with lots of feeds that have subscribed to, and users who prefer feed categories for easier access to specific news. Feeds can be added to specific groups, e.g. windows for windows news sites. It is necessary to enable feed groups in the options before they become visible in the popup.

Export and import options exist for the configuration, but unfortunately not for opml files. It is therefor not possible to import a list of feeds in the program. Chrome users need to click on the Save Options button before the changes become visible in the browser.

RSS Live Links is a handy extension for Chrome users who want to be notified right in the browser when one of their subscribed feeds is updated with new content.

The extension could use a bulk import option for adding multiple feeds at once. Another great option would be the ability to see full feed previews by hovering over the feed item. Chrome users with more than a handful of subscribed feeds should consider using groups to improve the display of feeds in the popup.

Feed readers like RSS Owl or the online service Google Reader are easy to use and act as a central hub for information for many users. Sometimes though, websites are encountered that do not offer RSS feeds. An example of such a website is the Google New service which publishes the latest Google product updates. The service itself is triggered by RSS, but visitors are not offered options to subscribe to a feed.

We have created a feed for that service using the free service Feed 43, and would like to guide you through the creation of a custom RSS feed. This should give you the tools at hand to create a feed on other websites that do not offer one.

A basic understanding of HTML is beneficial for this, but not necessarily required. Start by visiting the Feed 43 website, and paste the url of the web page that you want to create an RSS feed for in the form. We use http://www.google.com/newproducts/ for our example. Ignore Encoding and click the Reload button.

custom rss feed

All configurations happen on the next page. At the top, the page title and source code are displayed to the user. We need the source code later on, to find patterns for the news title, description and link. That’s the most technical and intimidating step of the process, but not as hard as it looks on first glance.

rss feed

The patterns are defined in step 2. Feed 43 uses the {%} variable to define variables, and {*} for contents that are not relevant. Now we need to delve into the source code, but before we do that, we look at the original page to retrieve title and description that we need to find in the source code.

Take a look at the first new product title at the page, and search the source code for it. For our Google New example that is “Elevation service now available in the”. You will find the text in the source, with HTML elements around it. Now, we replace the news item title with the {%} variable and add the whole line

<a href="http://www.google.com/newproducts/#" class="headline showbody">{%}</a>

to the Item (repeatable) Search Pattern* in step 2. But, if you look a bit closer, or more precisely search on you find that the title appears a second time in the source. This is unusual for most web pages, but in this case the second occurrence in the code is actually the right one. Why? Because the full text of each post is posted in that location as well.

For the article title, we choose

<div class="hidden-title">{%}</div>

and put the code in the Item (repeatable) Search Pattern field.

For the description, we look a line beneath and find

<div class="hidden-content">{%}<div class="blogger-post-footer">

The full code that we put into that field is

<div class="hidden-title">{%}</div>{*}
<div class="hidden-content">{%}<div class="blogger-post-footer">

See the {*}? This gets rid of everything in between the two fields. If you leave it out, you will notice that a click on Extract will find 0 items, if you add it, all items are found.

The clipped data below will show how each entry is displayed in the RSS feed. Take a note of the variables {1} and {2}, those are set to the title of the article and the description.

rss creation

We need to add those two to the RSS Item properties. The first into the title field, and the second in the description field.

feed43

A click on preview finally displays how the RSS feed will look in the RSS reader.

preview feed

Finally, the RSS feed address, and the edit page address are displayed to the creator of the custom RSS feed. And that’s how you create custom RSS feeds with Feed43. If you have any questions about the process, let us know in the comments.

Your Own News Maker is a very specialized form of RSS reader as its main purpose is not to inform the user of new posts but to turn those posts into pdf or fb2 format for offline reading.

Multiple RSS feeds can be added to the program as sources. The software will pull the latest articles of the RSS feeds automatically from the sites and display their titles in the content column.

If you would hit the make pdf or make fb2 button right now you would create a file that only contains titles and links to the articles but not the articles itself.

The page rules wizard needs to be used to select the part of the content that the user wants included in the pdf or fb2 document. A click on that button will open the selected article in html view with all html and script elements displayed. The user now needs to find the position in the html document where the content starts and ends.

It is furthermore possible to clear all html tags in the output and define the parser rules. Parser rules are used to define the content that is included in the pdf newspaper. The program fills that out automatically based on the content selection in the first step of the process.

A click on the pdf or fb2 button will then generate the document and display it in a preview window. A click on the ok button will open the save file dialog window to save the pdf to the local computer system.

Your Own News Maker is an interesting program to turn RSS feeds into pdf or fb2 documents. The content selection is slightly complicated and I ran into the problem that the ad beneath the content was included in the document even though it was not selected in the process.

The program is available as a portable version or installer for the Windows operating system as well as Linux. It can be downloaded from the Google Code project site.

Automatic Feed Downloader is a very simplistic but fully working alternative to download attachments from as many feeds as desired. It works by adding feeds to the program and selecting a download folder on the local hard drive. All attachments are by default sorted into subdirectories named after the feed to make it easier to link attachments to feeds.

The application will start downloading attachments of the feeds as soon as they have been added. It will keep track of the attachments that have been already downloaded to avoid downloading duplicates. The software needs to be executed manually as there is no option to schedule regular feed downloads from within the interface.

One option is to add the RSS Feed attachment downloader to the Windows Task Scheduler so that it is started regularly to download new attachments that have been posted. Automatic Feed Downloader is a portable software program for the Windows operating system. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

I went to Feedburner, tried pinging my feed, then re-synchronizing it, all to no avail. I then clicked on Feed Medic only to be told that my feed was just fine and not causing any errors.

Feedburner suggested to use the Feed Validator to check out that the feed was properly validating which it was.

One strange thing in the Feedburner control panel was that the statistics also stopped on February 10, 2010 which I suppose they should not have.

Feedburner does not have a support email address only a Google Group that one can post in. But the frequency that staff members seem to look at and reply to threads seems to be minimal at best.

Ghacks readers who have troubles with the feed can change the feed address to http://www.ghacks.net/feed/. This feed address is working fine and updating like usual.

Did anyone else experience issues with Feedburner feeds not updating or only periodically updating?

Update

The problem seems to be more complicated than that. I checked http://www.ghacks.net/feed/ in Firefox and it displayed just fine. I checked the same feed in Opera and it also showed entries up to February 10, 2010. Something is not right here. This means that it is likely that the issue is not Feedburner related but related to WordPress or the server.

Update 2

The issue has been fixed. It was related to the W3 Caching plugin which caches feeds by default as well. I disabled that in the settings and the feed should display fine now for all users.

Google Chrome users on the other hand need to locate the RSS feed links on the website to subscribe to them which is not very comfortable especially for users who subscribe to RSS feeds regularly.

The RSS Subscription extension changes this shortcoming by adding an RSS icon in the Chrome address bar which when clicked displays a feed subscription page that can be used to subscribe to the feed in various feed readers like Google Reader or My Yahoo.

This feed subscription page is not displayed to Google Chrome users by default who see the full feed instead which means that they still have to copy the feed’s url and paste it into their RSS feader.

The RSS Subscription extension is compatible with Google Chrome 4. It can be downloaded from the official Chrome extension gallery.