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On January 30th Microsoft's Windows Vista Operating System will hit the shelves of your local retailer bringing with it a huge upsurge in Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft claims there have already been 100 million downloads of IE7 and because IE7 has native RSS support, many predict this is the year the RSS will go mainstream.
While RSS may finally enter your grandmother's lexicon, many savvy Wired readers have been using RSS of years. But who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? We recently set out to test a number of RSS services that help you do more with your news feeds.
As most of you probably know RSS feeds are a means of pulling in news without having to open a browser. For some background on popular news readers and other way to get started using RSS, check out our review from a couple years back.
New services from the likes of internet giants Google and Yahoo combined with smaller, niche services like RMail, RSSfwd or Feed Shake can be combined to make your feeds even more useful.
One of the first frustrations many users experience on discovering to joys of RSS is that not every website offers RSS feeds. Even those sites that do have good RSS support may not delivery exactly what you're looking for.
One solution is to use feeds from search engines. If you'd like to track articles from your favorite author, but there's no feed available or that author writes for a number of sites, Yahoo News can help. Just search by byline and/or column title on Yahoo News and then subscribe to the search as a feed.
-------------the above tip should probably be credited to [Micro Persuasion][2]---------
Tired of always looking up your local theaters to find out what's playing? Thanks to [isnoop.net][1] it's easy to track your local movie listings even if the theaters near you don't have their own RSS feed. Just plug in your zip code and the scripts on isnoop will scrap Google to give you a list of theaters with movies, show times and an RSS feed for each. Combine those in your favorite RSS reader and you have an instant list of what's playing, where and when.
If your RSS reader has grown to a disorganized mass of feeds, you might want to consider combining and consolidating your subscription in to theme-based feeds. [Feed Shake][3] can merge, sort and filter multiple RSS feeds and Podcasts. Just enter the URLs meeting your criteria give your new merged feed a title and add it to your RSS reader. Feed Shake can also filter by keyword.
One the areas in which RSS excels is pushing time sensitive data quickly and efficiently. Thanks to Yahoo's Alerts service you can now get your RSS forwarded to your mobile device in the form of SMS messages.
One possible use for Yahoo Alerts involves combining search-based RSS feeds from Craig's List, or a similar service, to get apartment listings delivered directly to your phone. Enter your search criteria in Craig's List and copy the feed URL at the bottom of the search page. Paste that URL in Yahoo Alerts and select notification via SMS. Now every time an apartment goes up that meets your criteria, you'll get a text notification.
Many of even the best RSS clients on the market lack compelling archiving solutions. Thanks to services like RMail or [RSSfwd][4] it's easy to get your feeds delivered to your email account which makes archiving simple, but what if you only want to archive specific items?
The solution is to use a social bookmarking site to "flag" items. One possible work flow would be to read your feeds as you normally would in your favorite reader, then just open those items you'd like to save in a web browser and add them to your del.icio.us account (or similar service) and give them a unique tag. Then paste the feed URL for that tag into your RMail account and all your favorite items will be sent to your email account for easy storage.
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The above is a reader submitted tip, though I actually had the idea before he submitted it, however I didn't publish so i don't know about credit on that one
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If you use an email provider like GMail that offers tagging and search features you can quickly index and classify your saved items and build your own private reference library that's accessible from any computer.
[1]: http://isnoop.net/rss/theater.php "Theatre Search"
[2]: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/10/ten_rss_hacks.html "Micro Persuasion"
[3]: http://www.feedshake.com/ "Feed Shake"
[4]: http://rssfwd.com/ "RSSfwd"
[5]: http://www.r-mail.org/ "RMail"
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