I really have enjoyed using FeedForAll as a nice, customizable way to insert ANY RSS feed into a web page. I use it with some of my wordpress sites to get relevant news (relevant to the page in question) published without the toil of multiple daily updates. It’s a nice “set it and forget it” style tool.
Recently though I wanted to make some tweaks to the layout of some of my feeds:
I’ve just been using miro the last few days and I ought to mention it here. It’s a multiplatform program (windows/ mac/ linux) that let’s you subscribe to video feeds (much like a podcast catcher does for audio.) It also plays video within the player (you can organize your local video clips through it as well.) You can also search/download from youtube/etc. and you can add custom rss feeds such as those from tvrss.net for instance. It’s also bittorrent aware, so it can make use of bittorrent for downloading.
Some time back I complained about the Google indexing of the site after the Big Daddy upgrade. For a good while before Big Daddy, there was usually about a week delay between me posting and there being a full crawl of the posted page which was fairly impressive. Post Big-Daddy the coverage of even previously indexed articles was lousy for a good while. As recent as a week or two ago there were only 900-1100 pages (including feeds which are of arguable value for google to index (maybe I should block those to googlebot?…hmm…) Anyway, I just noticed that they’re up to 1600 pages (still including those rss feeds.) It seems spotty still, but they’ve finally got a post-big daddy article. The inurl feature is still annoyingly buggy though.
I was just at google news and noticed that they’ve apparently fixed the headers of their pages so that the “Add live feed” button automatically displays at the bottom of the firefox browser window when you browse their page. (I’m currently browsing it for a search.) Nice work Google…. I know when it was first announced this feature was not working which left me feeling as though it was slightly limited in it’s usefulness.
Of course, it appears that wordpress comes with support to generate rss feeds for the articles and comments listed here. I was curious to find a way to include a syndicated news feed in the site and have. So, for the main page we have Yahoo news top stories (at least for now.) At some point I may look to putting other feeds on other pages, hopefully somewhat related to the content.