Orangeinks

FeedScrub: Weed Out Unwanted Posts on Feeds

If you are an RSS fan and likes getting updates through RSS Feeds, then you better check out this one. FeedScrub is a service made for RSS junkies. We all have our favorite sites and blogs, but the thing is, not all articles posted on a particular site will catch your interest. There will probably a post or two that doesn’t concern you. FeedScrub will help you clean-up your RSS feeds.

Feedscrub is like a spam filter for your news feeds. It filters out the posts that are least interesting to you and leaves only the stuff that is relevant. When you Scrub a post about “politics”, the words in that post will be taken and use them to train your filter. After a while your filter learns that you’re not interested in “politics” and filters out posts about “politics”.

How it Works

1. First, tell Feedscrub which feeds you’d like to filter. In return they will give you one feed with all your content aggregated.

2. Next, for each post you’re not interested in, click the “Scrub” button. The more posts you scrub, the more accurate your filter will get.

3. Check your “junk feed” periodically to catch any relevant posts that were auto-scrubbed. If you find any, click the “Save” button.

This is a great tool for cleaning your feeds and filtering posts that are irrelevant to you. You can still view the feeds that were weeded out through the junk feed. Better check them every once in a while to see if you missed a few relevant stories.

Tags: feeds, FeedScrub, RSS

SnackR: Scrolling RSS Updates on your Screen

SnackR is a desktop application powered by Adobe Air and Flex that lets you view RSS feed right on your desktop in a scrolling manner. If you get tired from getting updates from your feed reader, you can use this as an alternative and get updates in a different fashion.

SnackR is a great alternative to normal feed readers available out there. It gives you that news flash thing that scrolls on the bottom of your TV screens. If you are using multiple/dual screens, one way to optimize it is to place it on your secondary screen so it will not be an obstruction to your primary working area. If you are using SnackR on a single monitor, you can easily hide it and let it sit on the corner of your screen until you need to use it. You also have the option to drag and dock SnackR to the four corners of your screen.

SnackR can be easily integrated with your existing Google Reader account. Just be careful on deleting feeds from SnackR for it will also delete them from your Google Reader database.

NOTE: if you enable Google Reader integration, and you delete a feed in Snackr, it will automatically be deleted in Google Reader as well (and if you add a feed in Snackr, it will get added to Reader too). We plan to make this optional in the future. (If you downloaded the previous 0.37 build, this build doesn’t have any new functionality, but makes the synchronization of feeds between Snackr and Google Reader clearer.)

There are also a few other features, such as the ability to post items to email, del.icious, digg, etc.–and a bunch of bug fixes.

Instead of going to your feed reader checking for updates, you can check them right on your desktop without opening your reader or scrolling your feed gadget installed in your system. If you’re not much of a feed reader kind of guy/gal, this is a cool way of discovering the power of RSS.

Tags: feed reader, feeds, RSS, snackr

Turn Your RSS Feeds into a Printable Magazine Style PDF

Tabbloid is a project of HP (Hewlett Packard) which offers a new way of delivering RSS feeds to readers. It will allow you to turn your favorite RSS feeds into a well designed printable PDF document. The produced document can be set to be delivered to you via email in a weekly, daily or hourly basis.

You can set up your own Tabbloid in just a few minutes. The service requires no signing up. All you need to do is add a few RSS feeds, place your email and set the frequency of the delivery. You can also select from their starting list of popular blogs/news sites.

This service is great for getting feeds emailed to you in the form of a single printable PDF. The feeds are delivered in full but you only get to have the text content. Videos and images are not included in the generated document. It won’t be of much use if you are going to use Tabbloid to subscribe to sites which heavily uses images (photo blogs) and videos for content.

Check out the sample PDF document below.

Favorite Blogs

Tags: Blogs, feeds, magazine, pdf, RSS, tabbloid