There is an infinite variety of things you can do with RSS feeds and a substantial number of those things can be done with Feed.Informer, which was formerly known as Feed Digest and just relaunched today. This super useful service was acquired in a small, unreported deal earlier this year and today comes out of a dormant period when new account creation was limited.
What can you do with Feed.Informer? You can splice feeds together, filter them for keywords and most importantly – display them dynamically on a web page with just a little bit of code. There are other services that do all of these things, but Feed.Informer is so quick and easy to use that a free account is worth checking out and a premium account may be worth paying for.
We Love Feed.Informer
Feed.Informer is a service I’ve used regularly for years and happily pay for every chance I get. It is the fastest, easiest and most user-centric way to publish items in a feed dynamically on a page. We’ve used it here on RWW in a number of posts, the best to see how it works is Ten Sites to For Finding Wonderful Things.
Why Use This Tool Instead of Others?
Much of Feed.Informer’s functionality can be performed better by Yahoo! Pipes but many people find Pipes intimidating and it gives users no control over the styling of RSS output on a page. It doesn’t offer PHP code like Feed.Informer does, so there’s no SEO benefit to using the Pipes “badge” for feed display.
SImplePie is a powerful way to parse and display RSS feeds and is probably what you want to use in a production environment, but it requires hosting on your own server and is beyond the technical capabilities of many new publishers.
Feed.Informer is simple, fast and powerful. Unfortunately, that’s why a fair number of spam bloggers probably use it. Automated website content by feed? Only recently have reputable publishers discovered good use cases for such technology. Our favorite? Displaying the feed for a user’s tag in Del.icio.us on a web page.
There’s a lot of things you can do with this handy little tool. It often throws up errors in the admin section of the site and it’s not as pretty as it could be – it’s not perfect, but day in and day out if comes through for us in powerful ways. Check it out and let us know what you think of the new Feed.Informer.
