Wednesday, May 30, 2007

RSS Keeps Getting Better

I have to admit, when RSS came out I wasn’t really very impressed.  Sure, at dinner parties I would jump on the bandwagon and proclaim the merits of RSS without actually believing.  When RSS feeds started showing up major websites, I perked up and paid a little more attention.  In FireFox, I actually started using RSS for news feeds.  That was really great because I no longer had to actually visit a site to see that there wasn’t anything there worth reading.

 

DevTeach taught me how much I don’t know.  The problem is, how can I keep up on all this information?  The next time I go to a conference, I’d really like to know a lot more going into the conference.  It was really very intimidating to be referred to as “Fly Catcher”.  In order to maximize my ability to learn new items, I decided to grab RSS feeds from all the presenters at the conference, as well as other development feeds.  That worked great, I got about thirty feeds to work with.  Using FireFox I started running into another problem.  How could I get a list of only the updated items, or perhaps only view items by category.

 

Enter: RSS Bandit.  RSS Bandit is an open source RSS aggregator that, for the most part, does a great job of check feeds and presenting new entries in an easily useable list.  Rolling down a single list of entries makes it much easier to find that one piece of information that I couldn’t find before.

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