After downloading and installing RSS Popper a new toolbar appears in Microsoft Outlook. The toolbar contains one pulldown menu with the options to edit feeds and configure the options of the Microsoft Outlook add-in. It does contain two switches that can be used to turn RSS delivery on or off and to Refresh the RSS items.

The RSS news items are displayed under the RSS folder in the Mail Folders panel. This is similar to the way how Microsoft Outlook 2007 handles RSS news feeds.

RSS Popper comes with a few general RSS news items installed but one of the main reasons to use it is to add your own RSS feeds to the program.

RSS Popper supports RSS / Atom feeds, iCalendar items, Bloglines and Newsgator accounts. Interesting options include the function to translate a feed or to use authentication.

RSS FWD (discovered at Donation Coder) is a service that can turn RSS news into emails. The service provides an easy to use interface. It works by entering the main url of the website in the form on the main page which is convenient for many users who do not like to search for the RSS news link on a website or do not know what RSS actually is.

The service will automatically discover the RSS news feed – if there is any – and display a preview of the latest items. The user has to sign up afterwards by providing an email address and password which will be used to login to the service and manage the subscriptions.

The interval of the updates can be selected during the subscription. It is possible to select real-time, daily or weekly updates in the inbox. Users with many RSS news feeds can import an opml file so that all feeds contained within will be automatically added to it.

Webmasters can make use of small pieces of code they can place on their websites to allow email subscriptions. Each email send out will contain an unsubscribe link which can be accessed to unsubscribe from the website. It is also possible to manage subscriptions directly on the RSS FWD website.

But when it comes to feeds no such thing existed. You could visit the website whenever a new feed would be published, copy the url and paste it into some translation service but that was not very practicable especially for large websites with lots of news updates.

The Google Reader team implemented Google Translate into Google Reader which is now available for anyone to use. That should get rid of most of the hassle. It’s actually pretty easy and straightforward to use. Lets take the Genbeta feed for instance. Genbeta is a Spanish news site that covers Internet news. They sometimes have great news stories which anyone who does not speak Spanish or a related language does not understand. So it was all about the links and titles that they posted until now.

Now it is possible to select automatic translation of the website’s contents into the user’s language. All that needs to be done for this to happen is to click on the Feed Settings button in the upper right corner of the Google Reader screen and to check the Translate Into My Language entry.

The RSS news feed will be automatically reloaded and translated into the default language of the user if that is possible. Google Translate does not support all language translations which might mean that you could be stuck with translating a feed into English instead of your own language.

One option that has become popular in recent months is to create pdf documents out of RSS News Feeds which solves the accessibility problem. Tabbloid is a relatively new Internet service that can turn RSS News Feeds into pdf documents and send those news digest right to the user’s inbox.

This is done by pasting RSS News Feed urls into the form on the main Tabbloid website. The service will check the feed, display a preview of the last news items that have been posted and ask the user to accept or reject it. If the user accepts the feed it gets added to the list of feeds that will be processed.

It is possible to add multiple feeds which would then all be used to fill the pdf document. Options exist to generate the pdf right at the website or set delivery options to receive the pdf document in the inbox. The possible intervals are hourly, daily or weekly.

The created pdf document of the RSS news feeds will look like pretty much like a newspaper. It will not contain images however, only the text and additional information like links. It is therefor easy to load the article on the website directly to post a comment or read it there to see pictures that have been posted.

The pdf documents do not contain advertisement and registration is not required to receive the magazine style RSS News Feeds. The email account has to be verified before the delivery starts.

Users need an Open ID to log into the service and a Twitter account to publish the RSS News Feed to. It basically works like this. The user creates a new account at Twitterfeed using an Open ID account. He can then create a new Twitter Feed to the account by supplying a Twitter account and a feed url of the feed that he wants to add. Once that has been setup Twitterfeed will publish new items on the Twitter account automatically until the user pauses or deletes it again.

The feed is not authorized which means that anyone can post any feed to Twitter which could be interesting for some users who would like to post a number of feeds to a Twitter account. A number of feeds? The number of feeds that can be published does not seem to be limited which in effect means that someone could create a new Twitter account and publish all of his favorite RSS News Feeds to it.

This could be useful if access to RSS News readers is limited or blocked in a network while access to Twitter is not. It could also be a nice service that webmasters could offer their readers. Spam could be a issue on the other hand.

Rarst posted a process on his own website that makes it possible to check all feeds for dead links. The process can be broken down to exporting all feeds in an opml file, extracting the links into a new text file and checking the links with a link checker.

Some feed readers might provide an easier way of discovering dead blogs either because the owner abandoned it or deleted the website completely. Google Reader for one is offering a feature called Subscription trends which show inactive feeds. Users have to click on the Trends link in the top left menu and choose the inactive tab under Subscription trends to get there.

The user can display the top 10, top 20 or top 40 inactive blogs. The name of the blog and the data of the last update is shown in the menu afterwards. It is then easy to unsubscribe to blogs that have not been updated by clicking on the trashcan icon.

The only way to enable alphabetically sorting again was to create new folders and add the feeds to them. New folders sort the items alphabetically by default.

A comment by Fernando mentioned that Google added a new Options links beneath the feed list next to Manage Subscriptions in Google Reader that makes it possible to select the default method of sorting the feeds. The option can be set to “alphabetical” or “my order”. Selecting alphabetical will sort all feeds alphabetical again. One interesting aspect of the choice is that users who choose alphabetical will not be able to move feeds around in the same folder in Google Reader. It is still possible to move them to another folder though.

If alphabetical has been selected as the default sorting option then the feed items will stay alphabetical in their folder and new items will automatically assume the correct alphabetical position in the folder that they are moved into.

This finally gives everyone who was frantically looking for a way to enable alphabetical sorting in Google Reader a way to enable it again.

Users should not confuse that behavior with the temporary addition of new feeds to the bottom of the folder they have been put into. Once a user logs out and in again the feeds are sorted alphabetically again.

Google Reader offers no “sort” button that would make it possible to sort the feeds alphabetically again if the user started dragging and dropping around feeds previously. If you are one of those desperate users who want their feeds to be sorted alphabetically again read on.

The sorting setting in Google Reader is folder based. This means that creating a new folder and moving the RSS news feeds to that new folder will do the trick. It still requires some manual work on behalf of the user but it is actually the only way enable to sort the feeds alphabetically again.

Now here is what you do. The left pane shows a Manage Subscriptions. A click on that loads all the RSS News Feeds that the user has added to Google Reader.

New folders can be created by clicking on the Change Folders pulldown menu and selecting the New Folder option.

And enter a name for the new folder.

The next step depends on the following. If you have been using folders before you can filter by those folders at the top right corner so that only the items of one folder are showing up.

That ensures that all rss news feeds that have been in a folder are displayed on screen and that they can be moved to the new folder without the other feeds interfering in the display.

A click on Change Folders next to each feed that is displayed makes it possible to select the newly created folder. Once all feeds that belong to a folder have been moved into the new one the old one can be removed the same way. Going back to the main page of Google Reader will show the feeds sorted alphabetically.

It sometimes is required to logout and login before they show up sorted but it is definitely working that way. If a user has not been using folders before he has to start using at least one folder for all the RSS news feeds so that they show up sorted again.

It is also important to note that feeds should not be dragged and dropped into folders anymore. The proper way of moving them to another folder is to use the Change Folder menu which appears in Manage Subscriptions and when clicking on the RSS News Feed itself in the main interface.

The second option is to browse the categories that are available and handpick news feeds from the available options. Each category offers several categories that contain multiple feeds. The Technology category for instance contains Software, Internet and Apple subcategories that contain a handful of news feeds each.

It is unfortunately not possible to add RSS news feeds that are not in those lists which means for example that Ghacks cannot be subscribed to yet. The developers provide an email address where users can mail suggestions to though.

None, some or all of the subscribed RSS news feeds can be turned into podcasts which is the unique selling point of Pimp My News. The user can subscribe to these Podcasts, supported are iTunes but also any other software program where the user can subscribe to Podcasts (so called Podcatchers).

The quality of the recordings is fine. It is not the best and a computer is used to create the RSS audio but it is understandable. The podcasts can be copied to mp3 players like the iPod to listen to the news while on the go.

The first thing that I was frantically searching for was a way to sort the subscriptions alphabetically in Google Reader. After searching through all settings and various Internet search engines I came up with nothing. Yes, that’s right. There is no way to sort the subscriptions automatically in Google Reader.

The only thing that you can do is drag and drop them around so that they are listed in alphabetical order. Imagine doing that with 200+ RSS News Feeds. That would take a while. Most users probably import their first batch of RSS News Feeds using an OPML file which could be sorted alphabetically.

Every new entry to Google Reader on the other hand is added at the bottom after each folder and existing subscription which means it has to be manually dragged and dropped into the right location.

I was recently looking for one specific feed that I subscribed to and it took me almost a minute to locate it because the subscribed feeds could not be sorted properly.

Exporting and importing the RSS News Feeds does not help either unless they would be imported into an application that provides access to a “sort” function that can sort the feeds alphabetically. That would on the other hand be much work and something that had to be done regularly.

The only requirement for using Yahoo Pipes is a Yahoo account which can be obtained freely if needed. I’m going to walk you through the customization of the Softpedia Windows RSS News Feed which lists freeware, demos, adware, trial and shareware software programs in its feed. Since I’m only interested in the free software I decided to use Yahoo Pipes to filter out all the other items.

You can use the same technique for your favorite website. Say you own a Windows PC and are subscribed to the Lifehacker RSS News Feed. You might want to filter out any item that describes software for an Apple Macintosh computer.

The Yahoo Pipes interface is divided into three panes. The left side contains the different elements that can be dragged and dropped into the main canvas area. You can use them to load RSS News Feeds and filter data among many other things. The last is the debugger which displays the data of the selected element.

We want to fetch an RSS News Feed and drag the Fetch Feed element into the canvas area. This element requires at least one RSS News Feed url so copy and paste on into the box. If you click on that box you will notice that the debugger has loaded the titles of the RSS News Feed at the bottom. You can click on the titles to see variables like descriptions or titles of the items.

You can click on the + icon next to URL to display another form to paste another RSS News Feed URL.

Click on the Operators entry in the left menu and drag the Filter element to the main window. Connect the Fetch Feed and Filter elements by pressing the mouse button over one of the nodes and (while holding the mouse button) moving it to the other node.

The elements are now connected. The process begins by fetching the RSS News Feed, sending it to the filters where they are customized and then to the output which is already available at the end. All that remains to be done is to create the filters.

You can block or permit items that match the filters. To do that you need to find differences or similarities. Softpedia uses classifications in their item titles. To find out about them you can head to the debugger area and click on a RSS News Feed item. You will notice that there is an entry called y:title which contains the title of the news item. You find the classification at the end of each title, for instance freeware, adware or shareware.

I decided to block all unwanted classifications from the news feed by selecting item.y:title > Contains > Classification, for example item.y:title > contains > Shareware. This will block all items with the Shareware classification in the title. I create three additional rules for Trial, Demo and Adware.

It would have been possible to do it the other way round. To allow only RSS News Feeds with titles like freeware or gpl. A click on the Filter element should update the debugger. It should only display freeware and gpl news items. Now connect the Filter element with the Pipe Output element.

The Pipe Output Element should display the same content in the debugger as the Filter element because nothing is changed in between.

A click on Save saves the pipe and enables a Run Pipe option in the header area. A click on that opens the Pipe profile with a preview area and options to use it as an RSS Feed or embed it on websites.

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.

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.

Update: I have removed the link to the created Dapper application as it has been removed from the official website.