Tips to make the most of the Blendr.


Here’s some ideas for cool ways you can make use of FeedBlendr – please send me more!

  • Get updates on potential new jobs from all your favorite job boards by creating a blend of searches in the categories you’re interested in — for example, web dev/engineering jobs in the US
  • Set up a Grazr by using the OPML output of a blend once you’ve created it and get a slick, dynamic outline or mini news-reader!
  • Make your own radio station or TV channel by blending together your favorite podcasts or vlogs, because FeedBlendr now supports “enclosures”!
  • Got multiple calendars in Google Calendar and want a single RSS feed of all of your events? Blend the feed for each one together and then subscribe to your blended feed of all of them! (Thanks Matt W!)
  • Go to Flickr.com, and find some tags that you like by browsing their tags page. Now get the RSS feed for each of those tags and blend them together using FeedBlendr – a tasty, taggy feed of images!
  • Click on over to del.icio.us and load up all the tags that you are interested in. Again, grab the feeds for each tag, and then blend them up for a delicious link-smoothie.
  • Ok – getting a little trickier now. Set up accounts at 43places.com, 43things.com, 43people.com and AllConsuming.net (all “sister-sites”, and very Web 2.0, so you’ll be cool if you do this). Now set up all your info in each one (places you want to go, things you want to do, people you want to meet and the things that you’re currently consuming). Get the feeds for each one, and blend them up in FeedBlendr – it’s a… well, it’s a you smoothie I guess!
  • Want your own custom news feed? Go to Yahoo! News Search and look for something you want to keep up to date on (eg. ‘ces’). On the results page, there’s an orange RSS link in the right-hand sidebar (towards the bottom). Copy the link from that button and bring it over to FeedBlendr. Do that for a couple different, but perhaps related topics (‘ces’, ‘electronics’, ‘vegas’) and blend them all up for a customized news-smoothie.
  • Love gadgets? (Me too!). FeedBlendr is perfect for creating a ‘master’ gadgets feed. Roll around to your favorite sites (perhaps Engadget, Gizmodo, The Gadgeteer and Gadget Lounge) and grab all of their feed URLs, drop them into FeedBlendr and you’ve got yourself a gadget-blend to end all gadget-blends.
  • Have you seen TopTenSources? It’s a cool site that gives you ten good sources for a particular topic. What if you want to mix and match those sources though? No problem – go grab the Latin Music, Alternative Rock and Jazz TopTen, blend them up, and you’ll get 30 sources across 3 music genres.
  • Got a lot of packages going all over the place? You can get UPS, FedEx, USPS and DHL tracking from SimpleTracking and use FeedBlendr to blend the feeds if you’ve got a bunch of packages on their way.
  • Did you make a blend and forget an ingredient? Wanna add another feed to your blend? No problem – use the FeedBlendr URL as one of the feeds in a new blend, then just add the ones you forgot into that one as well.
  • Need to keep track of some competitors? Blend all of their news feeds up and then you’ve just got one place to keep an eye on.
  • If you only want to hear from certain financial news sites, you can easily pick and choose them, and then blend their RSS feeds to get the latest updates from your trusted sources.
  • Blend together a few tags over at Technorati (go to one of the tag pages, and there’s a blue RSS link at the bottom of the page) to get a combined view of what’s happening in the blogosphere around certain topics.
  • Sick of a blend? No problem – just unsubscribe from it and if no-one else reads it in the next 2 weeks, it’ll automatically be deleted the next time the fridge gets cleaned out.

Got some more cool ways to use FeedBlendr? Let me know!