Catch a Feed and You're Sitting On Top of the World

I really hope I haven't set myself the standard of thinking up a song headline every time I write about the FeedShake people. I am not that creative. But I've managed it at least once more for a new feature of theirs, FeedCatch, available at http://feedcatch.feedshake.com/ .

Feedcatch is very simple and oh so smart. As you're probably aware most feeds have a limited amount of space. They may carry the last ten items or the last fifteen items. If you're only an occasional feed-reader, then a short RSS feed combined with your inattention can result in a lot of missed items, especially if the RSS feed belongs to someone amazingly productive like ResourceShelf or LibraryStuff.

Feedcatch does what it says: it "catches" the contents of a feed into one uberfeed that doesn't expire. You can set some limits on it -- delete the oldest item if there are more than x items in the feed (by default this is turned off) or delete the oldest item if it's more than x hours old (this is also turned off by default). You can also remove items after you follow their links.

Those of you who use RSS feeds to monitor news and topics of interest oughta be doing serious backflippage. Set up an RSS feed in Yahoo News to monitor your keywords. Turn it into a FeedCatch feed. Go do something else for a month. Then the time comes for you to act on the topic in which you're interested, and lo and behold you have a lovely enormous index of articles relevant to your topic.

RAWK ON.

Of course, some of them may have expired out of Yahoo's index so you'll have to find them on the Web-in-general, but it still gives you a place to start. Awesome.

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