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Results for posts tagged "rss" on Lifehacker Australia.
The Digital Inspiration blog points out some really cool uses of Microsoft's Live Search engine, including the hasfeed: operator that does what it sounds like: Filters your results to only sites that have live RSS feeds. It's a great tool for feeding your job search reader, and Amit has four other neat Live Search hacks.
Weblog My Mind Leaks posts a detailed guide to uncluttering your Google Reader feeds by using Google Reader Trends to prune items you don't need or read. The author walks through his own feeds, analysing which feeds he reads, which he doesn't, and which deliver too much content for him to keep up with. We actually suggested that Google Reader Trends could be a great way to prune your RSS feeds when the feature first dropped, but this post details several useful tips for doing just that.
YouTube Podcaster takes your YouTube video searches and creates RSS feeds of either links or download-able videos from them. In a standard RSS reader, the search results come back as video titles and links, but copy the link to the iTunes feed and you'll get a stream of MP4-formatted videos. Given the popularity of the video sharing site, you'll want to winnow down your search to avoid overwhelming your reader or iTunes player every hour, but the service provides two seriously useful functions that YouTube itself doesn't. The service requires no sign-up and is free, although donations are accepted.
Got yourself (or a friend) one of those shiny new digital, wireless-capable picture frames? Windows Live FrameIt combines multiple RSS feeds, along with the pictures from any web site, into a single, frame-friendly feed. As the Digital Inspiration blog points out, however, the resulting output also lets you check to see when images on a certain page—like the Google homepage, or a big "Sale" button on a discount dealer—have changed. In general, FrameIt is a pretty nice aggregator of both RSS-capable and standard web pages. The service is free to use, but requires a Windows Live sign-up.
The ReadWriteWeb site lists a few webapp combinations that add up to more than the sums of their parts. In the list: Jott & Evernote (as guest Brad Isaac detailed for us), AideRSS with the ticker-display Snackr, Facebook filtered through Dapper, and other clever ideas. But you're the folks who actually read about and use the services we write about—so let's hear some of your own killer combinations. What webapps filter/feed/pipe each other best? Post your link-ups in the comments.
We're pretty dedicated users of the email-based Google Alerts at Lifehacker HQ, but certain search terms have just far too many results to not turn into a kind of voluntary spam. FeedMySearch, a free Google-tweaking utility, turns new results from Google's many search areas—web, news, blogs, images, and more—into an RSS feed you can incorporate however you'd like. Some of these results, like Google News, have RSS feeds built in, but FeedMySearch's web search feeds are full-fledged with embedded video and pictures, and the site makes it easy to embed the feeds in your favourite start pages or bookmarking tools. FeedMySearch is free to use, no sign-up required.
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): AideRSS, an RSS feed popularity filter that Adam had a few bones to pick with, has released a free Firefox extension that integrates its popularity rankings into Google Reader. AideRSS says it uses the number of comments, Google backlinks, bookmarks on social sites like Digg, reddit, and del.icio.us, and more data to determine a PostRank, which it plugs next to each feed item and offers as a drop-down filter. While it's obviously going to bias your reading against fresher posts that haven't had time to make their mark, it might be helpful to anyone trying to cut down on RSS clutter. For their next version, let's hope for an options dialogue to remove that PostRank number from every single post, as the filtering bar may be more useful to most users. AideRSS is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.
Popular BitTorrent tracker Mininova has unveiled a new bookmarking feature that makes it easy to start a BitTorrent download on your home computer from anywhere. The new feature works by creating a personal RSS feed of all of your bookmarks. Since most popular BitTorrent clients support subscribing to an RSS feed of torrents, that means that each time you bookmark a torrent on Mininova, your BitTorrent client will automatically start downloading it. All you have to do is subscribe to your personal feed and get bookmarking. This is a very clever feature, but if you'd prefer even more control of your BitTorrent downloads when you're away from your main PC, check out how to remote control uTorrent or Transmission over the internet.
Windows only: Portable application NFReader is a no-frills feed reader that fits on your thumb drive. Even though it eschews a wide feature set in favour of a tiny footprint and minimalist interface, NFReader has the basics covered. Import your subscription list via OPML files or manually add feeds in the reader. View individual articles in either basic text or HTML format. If you're looking for an absolutely spartan feedreader without any clutter or feature bloat, NFReader's for you. NFReader is a free download for Windows only.
The Simple Dollar personal finance blog posts a great idea for anyone looking for a deal on a particular item or group of goods who doesn't want to be tempted by other deep discounts at a place like Amazon's Gold Box section. Using an RSS-filtering tool like Feed Sifter (or any keyword-search tool, like Feed Rinse), you can get pinged only when the specific item you really can buy shows up at an affordable price. For local deals, try setting up Craigslist feeds using boolean operators.
