cmurray.org

FeedRinse

This is an interesting development and long over due. This actually speaks to what Jon Udell was describing with the Share Your OPML site. With FeedRinse, you can subscribe to the feeds you like and then filter out articles by keyword, author, and so on.

Here’s what I did. I signed up for a free account on their site (the only difference of value with a paid account is the inability to use regular expressions). I could subscribe to my feeds there, but instead I imported my OPML from an export of my BlogLines feeds. I then added some filters (filtering out an author and some keywords from a couple of sites), and then exported the result into a new OPML file. Because I didn’t want to mess with my BlogLines feeds just yet, I imported that OPML into Sage (a Firefox plugin that I tried and do not use). Sure enough, the feeds were cleansed of the offending author and keywords. (One downside I can see is that it appears I need to import my feed to FeedRinse each time I want to change or add a filter, and then export that and reimport into BlogLines.) Here is what the feed to my site looks like behind the scenes: They provide this rinsing in a similiar fashion to FeedBurner, whereby they pass your feed through their service before delivering the content. I gave up trying to post the code here because the browser insisted on interpreting it. But trust me, it’s just a couple lines of code pointing to the FeedRinse site and passing my site in as a parameter, something like this:

xmlUrl=”http://www.feedrinse.com/services/rinse/?rinsedurl=nnnnn … htmlUrl=”http://www.cmurray.org”

Pretty simple stuff. But again, as Jon Udell points out, it would be hugely powerful to combine a SYO service with a FeedRinse service to create the ability to search through and filter for better and more useful data and trends. I think that service is very close at hand.