Have you collected a lot of RSS feeds over time that you neatly categorized in folders? If you are like me, you hardly have time to visit some of these folders because to actually go through them all, you are going to need a few hours a day. And who are we kidding?
RSS is the best thing since sliced bread to me and many of you who follow our feed. But, it offers little flexibility in choosing what you want to read in a particular feed. Often you end up receiving any updates made in a blog/site and then manually discarding (marking Read) that item in your feed reader. Some blogs offer your category feeds, so you can choose the category you’d like to follow. But, often times it is not that clear cut.
For instance, what if you don’t want to receive any post of mine that talks about ‘Remember the Milk’ or if you wanted to only receive posts that are about ‘Firefox’? How would you like to fine tune a feed to match your interests and filter out other stuff that are probably interesting to others reaching your feed reader?
With FeedRinse, you can do just that. And more.. Let’s take a look at it’s features and I’ll show you how it can help you overcome your RSS Overload.
FeedRinse Quick Facts
- Add individual feeds or import an OPML file (most feed readers have an export option)
- You can get a rinsed individual feed or create a Channel RSS with multiple feeds in it. (limit of 5 channels)
- You can choose to allow or block a post in a feed by specifying one or more filters. Use a filter like iPhone to block any posts about iPhone or a filter like Facebook in a channel to get all the news about Facebook or even a combination of multiple keywords.
- You can set filters for individual feeds or set filters for Channels (group of feeds)
- Feed filtering includes keyword filtering, author filtering, isolating filter by title or body & profanity filtering.
- Filtering supports Regular Expressions for power users.
- You can easily add a page you are browsing to FeedRinse with a bookmarklet.
- Once, you have rinsed your feeds, you can get RSS feed url for individual feeds or Channels. You could also opt to export all your rinsed feeds as an OPML file that is readable by most Feed Readers.
- It’s FREE to sign-up & use.
I have previously discussed, as a blogger how you can use Google Alerts to stay on top of your niche. FeedRinse can help you in a similar manner where you can create customized channel feeds.
Here are a few ways you can use FeedRinse:
- You can also use author filtering to follow a single author in a multi-author blog.
- If you are following feeds from Craigslist/Slickdeals.net but you are looking for just one particular item, use FeedRinse to get just that item.
- If you are following a job feed and you want to filter the feed to your interest, you could do that.
- Follow a personal finance feed to follow just posts about Mutual Funds or create your own custom Finance channel.
- Follow just chicken recipes in a Culinary blog
- Follow windows recovery tools from a site like Softpedia
As you can see, the way you can use FeedRinse is limited only by your
imagination. Sure, you might miss out on a few interesting posts when
you are filtering but isn’t it much better than just letting it
accumulate and marking them all as read in frustration?
I have heard of FeedRinse before but haven’t had the need to try it so far. I set out to do something about my Google Reader feeds. I simply wasn’t able to read all my feeds everyday.
I had subscribed to a lot of feeds and some of the feeds were getting updated with tons of posts. For instance Mashable has anywhere between 30-50 posts a day and it was increasingly getting hard to read all the posts. I could have deleted their feed but some of their posts were of great interest to me. That’s where FeedRinse helped me out.
After setting this up this week, today was the first time I was able to actually really read and mark my feeds as ‘Read’. It did take me a week to achieve this and I will be fine tuning this by adding and deleting feeds to FeedRinse as I go.
This is my workflow to rinse my feeds
- Move a potential feed with clutter to FeedRinse to the proper channel
- Either choose to allow certain posts or block certain posts
- Come back and add more filters or remove filters until I get it just right
So, give your feed reader a fall cleaning and read your feeds with your own spam filter for the feeds. Are you ready to overcome your RSS Fed overload?
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I currently track about 225 feed and can usually get through them in under 30 minutes. I don’t, obviously, read everything in full. I base what I read a lot on titles and the first few sentences.
FeedRinse looks like an interesting way to clean up and organize my feeds and might be something I have a use for. I’m pretty organized when it comes to feeds, but every little bit helps.
Kyle.. that’s incredible. I am sure you are using Google Reader with its keyboard shortcuts! I take folders of my reader during different times of the day and spend some time on it. But, 225 feeds in 30 mins is awesome. May be you should write a post on how to skim effectively. 🙂
I love stuff that helps me be organized and FeedRinse has definitely gotten up there! Why see stuff in my reader, when I know I’m not gonna read it?
I personally don’t feel the need for this. Like Kyle, I can generally get through a couple of hundred items within 20-30 minutes. I also have everything nicely split into folders for when I’m really in a rush. For instance, I have a tendency to read only the FOSS/Linux section when I only have five minutes. 😆
Hey Jake.. welcome to ShanKri-la! It’s only right to question the need for this. After I’ve gotten a few friends to convert to a RSS reader from going to websites, I had them complain about too much stuff to read. Now you see why I wrote this post.. 😀
K-IntheHouse,
Feed Rinse sounds like an excellent way to get a handle on RSS feeds! Thanks for the info! My feeds tend to get a bit out-of-control, since I’m usually so busy doing other things, I often let them sit unchecked for a while. I’ll definitely have to consider this option–and hopefully I’ll be able to manage to find the time to implement it! LOL! Stumbled!
Thanks again for a very informative post!
Jeanne
Jeanne, glad you enjoyed it and found it useful! I subscribe to some prolific blogs like TechCrunch and mashable who post about >30 posts a day. I kept finding myself marking them read without having the time to go through them. FeedRinse has helped me a lot in this area! 🙂