Feedster Lets You Roll Your Own RSS Feedpapers

Well dye me orange and call me pumpkin. Remember how I was complaining about the new Feedster political "Feedpaper" thing that, in my opinion, really limited the kind of feedpapers you can get? Turns out Feedster offers that feedpaper functionality to anybody whether they're interested in politics or not. You can learn all about it at Feedster's Tools page: http://www.feedster.net/builder.php .

You want the third option -- the feedpaper option. Choose that and You'll start through the feedpaper wizard. (You'll have to have a Feedster account to do this; registration with Feedster is fahree.) You'll be asked to choose the style of your paper (headlines or summaries only) and no more than ten RSS feeds (you can also choose to include them in your feedpaper only when specified keywords are present). Remembering my complaint of earlier I generated a couple of RSS search feeds for the search "election law" (from Daypop and Feedster) and picked up the election 2004 feed from Topix.net -- and Feedster summarily rejected all three feeds as "unknown," presumably because they're not in the Feedster database. All right says I, searched Feedster for "election law" and pulled out a few likely-looking 'blogs. After that you'll have the option to personalize your Feedpaper with your own nifty color scheme. Finally, you'll be asked to name and describe your Feedpaper, as it'll be listed in Feedster's index. When you've done that Feedster will give you an URL to your newly-created Feedpaper aaaaand a nifty JavaScript include for putting your Feedpaper on your own site.

Unfortunately even after several hours Feedster never recognized the Feedpaper I made (which I thought would be at http://now.feedster.com/ElectionLaw ). I'm trying to see if it's my browser; in the meantime if you get it to work drop me a note.

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