In my previous articles, I showed you how smart surfers use RSS to save lots of time (Are you a smart surfer?) and then introduced you to 10 best websites for which you should have the RSS feeds for (10 Life Changing Websites and Best RSS Feeds). In this article, I will show you how to play around with the RSS feeds you have created. Given below are five useful web based RSS tools which can be real time savers.
FeedJournal
Feed journal is a new generation award winning RSS tool which will enable you to gather your blogs in the form of a news paper. It is a proven fact that you can read 25% faster if the content is on paper. The site has got a reader (to aggregate your RSS content) as well as a publisher (which lets you publish your own content). But as the reader is more popular, let us discuss that in this article. You can specify various parameters like the news paper size etc. The content will be published just like your ordinary news paper and will be suitable for taking print outs.
ReminderFeed
This website acts as a reminder service that delivers reminder messages right to your feed reader. Lots of the people have the habit of checking their RSS feeds first thing in the morning. In that case, using reminderfeed.com to set reminders can work for you. The interface is very easy to create. You just need to key in the title, Start date & End date of the reminder and a short description. The last step is to specify which RSS reader you are using and you are done. If you go and check the RSS reader, you will find a new link.
The problem with this idea is that there are lots of scheduler and other stuff which can be used for setting reminders. The idea is good, but the question remains whether majority of people are going to like this idea or not.
Zaptxt.com allows you to create custom keyword searches to track your favorite rss-enabled websites via email, instant messenger or mobile device. You have to select the blogs which you need zaptxt to track and then give the search key word. You can also give tags for your search. The three options of delivering the processed content are Email, IM or directly to your mobile. The frequency can also be specified which ranges from every day to as soon as possible. If you are interested in only a particular category of blog posts in the whole blog, then zaptxt is the tool for you.
SpokenText.net is a completely free website which allows you to record PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, RSS news feeds, emails and web pages, and converts them to speech automatically. You can download your recording as an iPod book or mp3 file. And every member gets a personal podcast URL , which you can use to download recordings to iTunes or your iPod. You can also easily share your recordings on your web site or blog using SpokenText Badges or individual recording players. You can also create a dynamic badge of public Spoken Text recordings that you can easily add to your web site or your blog.
Mail Bucket
This is an experiment in alternative methods of email management. For now its only feature is a public email-to-RSS gateway: forward your email to slurp@mailbucket.org and have your news reader pick it up at mailbucket.org/slurp.xml (where you choose slurp, having checked that it's not already in use).
The service is probably most useful to those who lurk on high-traffic mailing lists, but it could also be used as a rudimentary bridge between applications, with email as the transfer protocol.
