If you’re publishing something online nowadays, you’re probably generating a news feed? to go with it. Blogs, image hosts, news collectors, and a host of other applications automatically generate news feeds in order to spread their content to as many people as possible. This weekend I did some testing on how to enhance the feeds I’m providing to my readers.
Create an automated mailing list
At the top right of this page you can see a “subscribe by email” form for Sharing at Work. This is a great feature of the FeedBurner feed enhancement toolkit which I use to enhance this site. FeedBurner has many other great features like subscriber stats, feed publicity tools, and compatibility tweaks for different feed readers.
Remix your feeds
One of the best ways to make your news feed more comprehensive is to mix in several related feeds so that your readers get a bigger picture of the information flow around a site. This weekend I used Yahoo Pipes to splice together our family blog with our photo/video feed from another site. The finished package is a feed that syndicates both sources and pushes it out to a Feedburner-powered mailing list.
The impressive flexibility of Pipes can be a bit intimidating at first, so if you’re feeling hesitant you might want to try looking at some of Feedburner’s built-in feed splicing tools like “include my Flickr photostream” or “include my del.icio.us bookmarks“.
Create a printable newspaper of your feed
FeedJournal has an easy to use tool that takes a news feed and magically converts it into a PDF newspaper filled with your site’s content. See this site as a newspaper!
Roll custom feeds back into your main page
Try using a tool like AideRSS to automatically identify your “best” posts by comment count and other traffic measures. Take the AideRSS ‘best posts feed’ of your site and then plug it into your sidebar as a widget. Maybe you are a big fan of a site like FriendFeed and you’d like to bring your FriendFeed activity back to your main site in the form of a sidebar panel? It’s not hard at all, here’s mine.
Add your own news feed tricks below
There is an ocean of tools available to enhance your news feed. What have you tried and enjoyed in the past? Is there something you’d love to add to your news feed but you just don’t know how? Leave a comment below and we’ll see what we can do.
