It’s no secret or mystery that RSS is a seriously important part of producing web content. It can increase your readers, help maintain a community and also earn you some extra money if you set things up right. I’m not going to go into how it works, what it does or how to set it up in this article. I just want to share seven cool RSS goodies that I think you might enjoy.
- If you haven’t thoroughly checked out all the gadgets and gizmos on Feedburner then do that first. I will go so far as to say that you need this site if your feed is going to succeed. Use the WordPress plugin to make sure your feed subscribers are counted all in one place, you can add social networking icons and various monetization options.
- If you are sick of that orange brick on your site, HongKiat has a killer collection of 40 feed icons that are free to download. If you’re looking for something snazzier and more intersting than the standard orange square, you will definitley find something you love here.
- For those of you looking to spice up your feed icon yourself, Feed Icons offers a developers’ pack for free. The download includes feed icons in various sizes, colours and file formats so you can hack and color to your heart’s content.
- Everyone has their favorite reader. I am hooked on the perfect couple of News Gator and Feed Demon. This powerful duo (actually a trio when you consider the mobile apps) offers both a web-based feed reader and an app for your desktop. It is very easy to sync the two – you can even set automatic sync. You can add feeds using either application, there is a huge amount of customization available and the Clippings function allows you to save individual posts to read later. I also really love the Feed Demon panic button that lets you clean out your downloaded feeds based on counts or dates.
- Toluu is a service (free) that lets you publish your OPML file – a file created by your feed reader – to share your feeds with others. It’s sort of like social networking through feed sharing. You can use your feed list to find other feeds you might be interested in and folks to interactive with. This site is currently open by invite only so I haven’t been able to sign up. If you have a Toluu invite code you are ready to share, I’ll link to your site if you send it my way via the Contact form.
- A great way to display feeds on your blog (for example, in a sidebar, is by using the Wowzio feed content widget. WIth this widget, you can display up to 50 of the most recent posts from any blog. A great use for this is for those with multiple related blogs. You can cross-advertise by placing the feed from other blogs in the sidebar. Wowzio widgets are super-easy to set up and install.
- Yahoo! Pipes is, at its most basic, a way to put multiple feeds in one place. It does a whole lot more than that, though. It’s highly customizable and full of features. I’m still exploring all it can do and I think I could spend another year doing so. Once I get everything like I want it, I will use it as a place folks can go to read the feeds for all my blogs, view all my photos and see anythinge else I’m publishing on the interwebs all at once. However, I think it would make a damn good overall feed reader as well if you organized it well.
There are many, many fun and interesting RSS-related gadgets and tools out there. This is just a very small handfull. A good place to start if you want even more is 120+ RSS Resources at Mashable.
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