Genesis

Rather than explaining what this new free web tool is good for, let’s explain why we needed it: like many of you, we were using iGoogle to follow interesting blogs (now using ProContact Portal system). However, as you may have noticed, the more the blog has good content, the less often its author is posting (and that’s fair so).

At the end, we finished with dozen of inactive feeds, and a huge iGoogle homepage. Thanks to Feedmix, we’ve aggregated our preferred RSS feeds by topic (sorted by published date), and they get nicely displayed on our iGoogle homepage.

Give it a try

That’s probably the best way to see all what you can get out of FeedMix™: get a try. It’s (100%) free, even requires no login/password.

Simply enter one or more RSS feed url, press the button. Next page show you the feeds analysis result. From there, you may:

• Edit the feed to correct an URL or customize the feeds name
• Enjoy your newly generated unique RSS feed in your favorite RSS feed reader
• Generate a short url to share your custom feed with your friends

Geek feature inside

You will notice the « keywords » feature. If the RSS feed(s) you’re following are about various topics and you want to restrict to some « areas » (subjects), simply list your keywords (comma separated), and the number of occurence you want to get a feed entry included in your Feedmix™ mashup.

Want an example? Say you want to focus on the topic « feeds ». Not « how to feed my animal », but feeds like XML, RSS, Atom. A simple way to filtering out false positive would be to select the following options:

keywords: feed,rss,xml,atom

Triggerlevel: 2

Match Mode: weighted

• An entry with one occurence of « feed » will not be selected. An entry with only one occurence of « feed », or « rss », or « xml », or « atom » will not be selected.
• An entry with 2 or more occurences of « feed » will be selected. An entry with one occurence of « xml » and one occurence of « atom » will also be detected.

This is definitely a good example: you  may still have « false positive » (RSS entry talking about feed/food, not feed/stream). That’s why we introduced an additional Match Mode: the logical AND

keywords: feed,rss,xml,atom

Triggerlevel: 2

Match Mode: logical AND

• An entry with one occurrence of « feed » will not be selected. An entry with only one occurrence of « feed », or « rss », or « xml », or « atom » will not be selected.
• An entry with 2 or more occurrences of « feed » will not be selected.
• An entry with one occurrence of « xml » and at least one occurrence of « atom » or « feed » or « rss » will however be selected.

Limitations

Even if we now the huge potential for webmasters, SEO, MFA addicts, we’ve currently set almost no limitation yet.

However, please bare in mind this free RSS mashup service is aimed at end-user, and our server is sized for a « personnal » usage.

So, if you plan to use it in any « One-To-Many » case, we ask you to contact us. We’ll provide you what we call a RING (a unique token), sothat we know you. By knowing you, we will be able to grant you specific server ressources.

Novaclic will come back soon with some exciting news and revolutionary services… stay tuned!