The Hindu : Business : Web feed tools

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Sep 20, 2004

Business

Business

Web feed tools

THIS WEEK NetSpeak features a few tools related to RSS based web feeds or news feeds.

Most web sites with dynamic content host RSS (Rich Site Summary) based web feeds or news feeds for distributing condensed content.

Generally a feed is placed under an orange button labelled `XML' or `RSS' and a site's visitor uses this link to subscribe to the news feed with his/her feed aggregator.

For subscribing to a feed in this manner, you need to grab the link, move over to the feed reader and then go through its subscription process.

However, if with some technique, you can enable your site visitor to subscribe to the feed by just clicking on the `XML' button, the subscription process will be rather smooth. This is what `quickSub,' the free JavaScript function, achieves.

It helps you add a little bit of intelligence to the `XML' button and when a visitor moves his mouse over it, a menu with subscription links to several feed aggregators pops up.

Now, the visitor can click on the aggregator of his choice and automatically get subscribed to the feed. For more details: http://www.methodize.org/quick sub/.

RSS file creation tool

Though almost all news web sites and blogs have RSS feeds, some web sites still do not have it. Also, the RSS format is gaining acceptance in other sectors in which we have to provide new/updated content to customers/clients regularly. Hence, you will be better off if you have the skill to create an RSS file.

An RSS file has to follow some specified standards and to build a web feed manually, you need some understanding of this file format. Fortunately, there are many free tools available for creating an RSS feed for people with little knowledge about XML or RSS file format. The RSS feed generator program, ListGarden (http://softwaregarden.com/products/listgarden/), written in Perl, is one such a tool.

With this tool, you can build an RSS feed in a few minutes. Apart from helping you generate an RSS feed, the program lets you directly publish the feed on to your site. If your Windows has no Perl on your machine, you can use the executable version of the software.

RSS to HTML converter

A news aggregator reads web feeds subscribed by you and displays the content of each feed separately. At times, you may need to view the content of several feeds together on a single web page. To tackle such situations, have a look at the service, `rss.toolkit' (http://rss.toolbot.com/) that enables you to combine several RSS feeds into a single web page.

As an indication of the growing popularity of news feeds, many new search engines/directories specifically meant for finding RSS feeds are available. These help you to easily spot web feeds relevant to your requirements. The search engine `2RSS.com' (http://www.2rss.com/) is one such product worth a try. Apart from featuring a web feed directory, 2RSS features links to a variety of the latest RSS related resources that include `news readers,' `software' and `articles.' RSSDaily news (http://www.2rss.com/news/) that lets you view the latest content from several news sites on-line is another highlight of this service.

SciencePort (http://scienceport.org/index.php) that targets scientific news feeds is yet another of this kind.

Random web sites

Netizens come across interesting web sites quite accidentally.

In fact, this author has on several occasions stumbled on such sites purely by chance. Many tools/services that simulate this process and enable you to jump over to totally unknown sites are available.

The service, StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/), mentioned in an earlier column, is one such tool. It takes you over to good web sites that have been visited/recommended by other netizens.

Recently, this author tried out a similar service called Randomwebsite (http://www.randomwebsite.com/).

By clicking on the label `randomlink' on the service's home page, you may land up on some excellent/obscure sites.

Copernic Desktop search tool: In the past, this column had featured a couple of tools developed by Copernic (like the Copernic summarizer). A few days ago, this author chanced upon another product from the Copernic family, called `Copernic Desktop Search.'

This tool can be used as a search service for your desktop. Once installed/invoked, Copernic indexes different types of files that include document files, image files, e-mails, PDF files and music files on your desktop.

After the index creation process gets over, the tool allows you to conduct a string-based search anytime you like and almost instantaneously displays the files on your desktop that contain the string.

Apart from allowing you to search for files on your hard drive, you can initiate a hunt for documents on the Net also. For more details on this free product: http://www.copernic.com/en/ products/desktop-search/index. html.

Open book project

O'Reilly Media (http://www.oreilly.com/oreilly/about.html) is a major publisher of books on computer technologies. It has a project that publishes books with less copyright restrictions called `Open Books Project' (http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/). Here, you will find many computing related books such as "Learning Debian GNU/Linux,'' "Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition'' and "Making TeX Work.'' All these books are available for free download.

J. Murali

Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in

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