Use FeedHub to create a filterable and customizable master RSS feed

Posted on September 28, 2007 at 8:09 am

So can anyone tell me how many feeds they are currently subscribed to? 25? 50? 100? Possibly more! With all of those feeds and their corresponding topics and categories, it can sometimes take quite a bit of time to find a post or story that really interests you. Some blogs out there are very niche and therefore their readers find EVERY post to be useful, however, for most other blogs and sites (including mine), there are a wide range of topics that are written about and a reader may only be interested in one particular category.

It’s great if the feed is customized to group items by popularity or by category, but that’s far more the rare than it is common. And that’s where FeedHub comes in to save the day! FeedHub is a new type of RSS aggregator that takes all of your feeds, joins them into one feed, and then filters out all of the content that you do not read or that is not relevant to you.

Of course there are already many feed aggregators out there that let you read all of your feeds in one place and sort them by feed name, post date, topic, etc. What makes FeedHub different and slightly more useful is the fact that it tries to learn what your preferences in terms of content and automatically filters out posts that it thinks you would not want to read.

So let’s say you read LifeHacker’s RSS feed every day and always end up liking Gina Trapani’s posts more than Adam Pash or Wendy Boswell. Well, FeedHub will recognize that you never read anyone else’s posts from that RSS feed and will automatically filter out those articles. Also, FeedHub will give you feedback and let you see why it chose to keep a story in the feed. You can also customize it to be more (cut out more stories) or less (include more stories) aggressive.

The other cool thing about FeedHub is that you can subscribe to the filtered monster feed via your own feed reader. You do not have to go to FeedHub to view the new feed, which is great because you can continue using your regular feed reader.

The way it works is that you have to upload your OPML file to FeedHub for analysis. The OPML file is just an XML file of all your feeds and it can easily be exported from your reader. I’ll go ahead and explain how you can do it for Google Reader and Internet Explorer.

Export OPML file from Google Reader and Internet Explorer

In Google Reader, click on Settings at the top right and then click on Import/Export. Click on Export your subscriptions as an OPML file.

For Internet Explorer, click on File and choose Import and Export. Choose Export Feeds to create the OPML file.

Here are a couple of things you can do with FeedHub taken from their site:

Quick-Read feed – get the highlights from a set of feeds that you don’t want to read in their entirety
Topical feed(s) – create a personalized feed for a broad subject that you want to explore over time
Special-Purpose feed – choose feeds to get information on a narrow topic that interests you right now
Audition feed – use the bookmarklet to quickly and easily add new feeds and read the highlights to see if you like the content enough to keep them.

Once you upload your file, your new feed will be created and you can set the volume of posts that you would like to see daily. You can then log into your account and vote on items that you like all the time, somtimes, and not at all.

Definitely a cool idea and if the filtering actually works well, VERY USEFUL! Give it a shot and post a comment on what you think about it! Enjoy!

via AppScout

[tags]feedhub, rss feeds, filter feeds, customized rss feeds[/tags]

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Comments

3 Responses to “Use FeedHub to create a filterable and customizable master RSS feed”

Sean Ammirati said on : September 28th, 2007 at 12:04 pm

Aseem,

Hi, I’m the VP of Product Management and Business Development at mSpoke.

Thank you for the thorough and thoughtful review! I’m glad you’ve found FeedHub and enjoying it.

Please let me know if you have any questions or ideas for additional functionality.

- Sean

FeedBlender - Combine multiple RSS feeds into one blended feed Says:

[...] bells and whistles. I tried out another similar service like this before called FeedHub, that combines multiple feeds into one, but it had too much logic and ended up being more of a pain because it didn’t [...]
January 11th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Subscribe to the RSS feed of a category, author or tag in Wordpress Says:

[...] filtering for any reason, you can also check out my previous post on FeedHub, which allows you to create a personalized RSS feed. The cool thing about this service is that it monitors what kind of content you like and will [...]
December 13th, 2008 at 5:24 am