One prime example where keyword filtering can be useful is a website that several authors write for. If you are only interested in one author you could use the author’s name as the keyword so that only the author’s stories land in your RSS reader.

Notify.me has been mentioned on nearly every tech blog out there in the past weeks. It is basically a keyword filtering service that monitors RSS news feeds and informs the user of posts that match the selected keywords.

It is a bit different from services like Yahoo Pipes because it can send those notifications only to an email client, cell phone or instant messenger. The process can be divided into the following steps:

• Configuring a destination (cell phone, email, instant messenger)
• Adding a source
• Configuring keyword filters

It is not really complicated but the user needs to know about RSS feeds. The keyword filter can be set to either include or exclude posts that match keywords. Setting up no keyword filters sends all new items to the selected destination. An include keyword filter will only send the items containing the keyword while an exclude keyword will send all except those that are excluded.

The keyword filtering is still a bit rudimentary. There is no option to filter parameters like title, tags or authors which is definitely a much needed option.

Another thing that is missing is the ability to configure multiple destinations of the same type. Only one account of each type can be configured. This basically means that it is not possible to setup multiple email addresses in one account.

I cannot really see the need for such a service right now. What’s your take on this?

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A user of Feedrinse may add up to 500 feeds to the service and group those feeds in different channels. He can do so by adding them manually in a web form or importing a opml file that contains a list of feeds. The filters can then be configured for feeds individually or for every channel.

The filter options can be used to allow or disallow feed items that do or do not contain specified posts, titles, bodies, tags or authors with a certain string. It could for instance be set to only include feed items that have been written by a specific author or that have been tagged with a certain keyword.

A new RSS feed link will be created that contains only those items that have passed the filter. Users who need more options to filter and customize feeds should take a look at Yahoo Pipes instead.

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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.

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