Introducing FeedBlendr!
I’m pretty happy to announce that FeedBlendr is now live, and ready for your blending pleasure. You may be wondering what this does, and why you should care? Well let me tell you.
I read a bunch of blogs and news sites via their RSS/Atom feeds, but I found that organizing them and managing individual feeds is a pain. I also realized that I never really went through the process of reading individual feeds, since I just checked all my current, unread items. I’m using the wonderful Vienna News Reader on my PowerBook, and I find that I only ever look in the Smart Folder ‘Unread Articles’.
That got me to thinking – why do I even bother categorizing and grouping all my feeds in separate folders, when I barely ever actually use those folders once I’ve configured them? I started thinking that combining feeds into a single, date-ordered stream would be pretty useful, and from there, I heard people like Dave Winer over at Scripting News talking about the idea of a River of News and that made sense to me. He was (is) talking about making a whole new feed reader to work like that, but I had already started working on bringing it to everyone, without requiring them to change reader.
Thus FeedBlendr is born!
Enter in a bunch of feed URLs, and then click the big ol’ BLEND button, and you’ll get back a single URL. From that new address, you can get a blended version of all of those feeds, ordered (hopefully) by the date of individual posts, so you can have your very own river of news (or tasty blog-smoothie as the case may be).
A simple tool that hopefully scratches a simple itch. Hope you enjoy it.