There is an infinite variety of things you can do with RSS feeds and a substantial number of those things can be done with Feed.Informer, which was formerly known as Feed Digest and just relaunched today. This super useful service was acquired in a small, unreported deal earlier this year and today comes out of a dormant period when new account creation was limited.
What can you do with Feed.Informer? You can splice feeds together, filter them for keywords and most importantly - display them dynamically on a web page with just a little bit of code. There are other services that do all of these things, but Feed.Informer is so quick and easy to use that a free account is worth checking out and a premium account may be worth paying for.
Feed.Informer is a service I've used regularly for years and happily pay for every chance I get. It is the fastest, easiest and most user-centric way to publish items in a feed dynamically on a page. We've used it here on RWW in a number of posts, the best to see how it works is Ten Sites to For Finding Wonderful Things.
Much of Feed.Informer's functionality can be performed better by Yahoo! Pipes but many people find Pipes intimidating and it gives users no control over the styling of RSS output on a page. It doesn't offer PHP code like Feed.Informer does, so there's no SEO benefit to using the Pipes "badge" for feed display.
SImplePie is a powerful way to parse and display RSS feeds and is probably what you want to use in a production environment, but it requires hosting on your own server and is beyond the technical capabilities of many new publishers.
Feed.Informer is simple, fast and powerful. Unfortunately, that's why a fair number of spam bloggers probably use it. Automated website content by feed? Only recently have reputable publishers discovered good use cases for such technology. Our favorite? Displaying the feed for a user's tag in Del.icio.us on a web page.
There's a lot of things you can do with this handy little tool. It often throws up errors in the admin section of the site and it's not as pretty as it could be - it's not perfect, but day in and day out if comes through for us in powerful ways. Check it out and let us know what you think of the new Feed.Informer.
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Hey Marshall, just wanted to add a little blatant plug for grazr http://grazr.com (even though I know we haven't gotten openID yet :) ).
Grazr also has tools for splicing and filtering feeds, although most people just know us for our OPML browsing and feed widget.
We have a drag and drop editor, and a feed discovery / social media service discovery engine in the editor as well.
The free account allows unlimited hosting, widgets, and one "stream" (which is our nomenclature for spliced feeds). Additional "streams" are a pay feature.
The UI is still confusing (I know) and we've recently branched out with a new product so a Grazr redesign has been delayed. Wish there were more hours in the day :)
Posted by: mikepk | August 19, 2008 11:09 AM
oh wow, this is a great resource! thanks so much for posting it.
Posted by: chantix | August 19, 2008 1:52 PM
Just FYI, Y! Pipes has had a PHP output renderer since April.
Posted by: Ken Kennedy | August 19, 2008 2:23 PM
this great post bro..thanks your information
Posted by: heddy | August 19, 2008 7:27 PM
Wow! I totally need this. Pipes is making me crazy right now. Nice!!
Posted by: Sarah Perez
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August 19, 2008 8:31 PM
At first i thought this was a great service, but since using it over the past 24 hours I'm not impressed with the speed in which it updates spliced feeds. I've been using it to pull various feeds from my google reader into one output and the delay in seeing new items appear can be measured in several hours. Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Posted by: Jaykay | August 21, 2008 12:14 AM
Jaykay: I was the original developer of Feed Digest (now Feed Informer) before selling it just over a year ago. In answer to your question, "free" users' updates were limited to something around the 3 hour mark. This is because I ran it as a service where I wanted a smaller group of users to pay for faster service. As the service is effectively free for all now, though, I suspect this attribute could be changed and will try to point it out to the new owners.
Posted by: Peter Cooper | August 21, 2008 5:24 PM
Looks very promising. I will try to use it in one of me next posts. Thank's
Posted by: Kolia Shlapak | August 30, 2008 5:06 AM
THANK GOODNESS, it's back!!! I've been trying to update my account info since January; I'd given up hope and was checking out other things, when on a last desperate whim, I Googled "feedinformer" and found this article. Thank you, thank you!
It's a very handy tool; I use it for posting news and event information on the home page that I maintain for an academic library ("Library FYI"). It pulls posts from our library's blog and puts them up on the home page. This is great, because any of my colleagues can funnel content to the home page by posting to the blog without my having to open up file permissions on the home page to anyone but me. :)
Posted by: ninermac | September 8, 2008 8:14 PM
PS, Peter and Jaykay: weren't there instructions on customizing the display posted before where you could use PHP and a couple of other methods to get things to post more quickly? I get that complaint from my users, too--"I just posted something to the blog; why don't I see it on the home page?"
Posted by: ninermac | September 8, 2008 8:21 PM