Just another nerd.
Five Filters’ Feed Creator is a tool designed to generate RSS feeds for websites that do not offer their own feeds.
The Feed Creator devs have posted a guide where they create an RSS feed from the Reuters website (Reuters killed off its own RSS feed in 2020).
StarRSS is a clever Javascript-based RSS feeder that takes any RSS feed and turns it into a Star Wars crawl, complete with John Williams score.
One of the areas where having a smart phone has really upped my productivity is when it comes to whipping through my Google Reader feeds. I subscribe to about 400 different feeds, and typically I’d skim through about 300-400 stories per day on my laptop. Of those, there would only be a small number I’d highlight or print out the article for further reading.
Now, I pretty much exclusively deal with my Google Reader feeds on my smart phone. First, the Google Reader mobile website is awesome. Google finally came out with a Google Reader app for the Android, but it pretty much sucks compared to the mobile website.
I set the mobile site to show 50 headlines at a time and skim through them. When I come across a website or article I’d like to follow up with, I pop up the “Share Link” option and route it to my Instapaper account where I can go back to it when I have the time.
These days, I typically go through 2,500 to 3,000 headlines a day, mostly in those spare moments when I’m waiting for something else to happen or while I’m getting my daily walking in.
Maybe I’m just out here on the cutting edge and no one else in the universe would find this useful, but I’m always amazed that Amazon doesn’t have RSS/Atom feeds for wishlists. I could subscribe to all of my relatives/friends wish lists in Google Reader and give Amazon yet another opportunity to suck up my hard earned cash.
But, alas, no. I gave up on Amazon Wish Lists awhile ago and was using TheThingsIWant.Com which pretty much sucked except that it had RSS feeds. But now it appears to be down for the count (offline the past few days).
Companies seem to omit services like this because the knock is that the average user has no idea what RSS is, much less why they’d want to use it. Which is true enough, I guess, but there are plenty of Amazon-related sites geared to non-technical users that at the moment are forced to scrap wish list information from Amazon. Why hamper the development of such services by not offering native RSS/Atom feeds?
I like statistics. I like video games. I love video games that give me not only statistics, but web-accessible statistics like Guitar Hero does. For example, check out my Guitar Hero 3 community page which tracks pretty much everything online that the game does locally on my XBOX.
To enable this all I had to do was give the Guitar Hero site my XBOX gamertag and a code generated by the local install of GH3 on my console. Now, everyone on the Internets can see how bad I suck at GH3!
I really wish every game would do this. Since there are so few big game companies to begin with, it should be possible to set it up so I could go to, say, EA.com and view stats on all of the EA games I own.
The one thing that I would do to improve the GH3 site is add an RSS feed. Update the feed everytime I do beat my previous high score on a song or achieve some new accomplishment.
Last night I bought an XBOX 360, mostly for streaming video from my basement server to my living room (plus the upcoming stream Netflix to XBOX upgrade). I also threw in a few games, though I’m not a big fan of console games.
Anyway, so you can create an account for XBOX Live, and it keeps tracks of what you’re doing on the XBOX, game achievements, etc. Accept there’s no fricking RSS feeds for any of it. WTF?
Fortunately, InternetDuctTape.Com created a Yahoo! Pipe that scrapes your XBOX Live account and then RSS-ifies it. Just visit the Pipe, put in your Gamertag and then Run the pipe. Then select the “Get as RSS” option from the “More Options” drop down to get the RSS version.