Mix RSS Feeds, Put Them on Your Site

After reviewing Feedshake, I got an e-mail from Peter Cooper telling me about FeedDigest. Not only could FeedDigest mix RSS feeds, he said, it'd then give you code so you could put 'em on your site. So I went and looked at it. And really, what's not to love about a service whose slogan is "Making your feeds fabulous"?

FeedDigest is at http://www.feeddigest.com . I found it didn't work quite right in Opera but it seems to be fine in Firefox. Creating a mixed feed is a several-step process: you start at the front page by specifying ONE feed. From there you'll need to specify the name of the mixed feed, and how many items you want to show at a time. There are options here for filtering by keyword and filtering out duplicate content, but these options are hidden by default. (Why?)

After that you'll have to specify the kind of template you want (this will determine what the feed will look like when you put it on your site) and finally, you'll be asked for a user name and password to create an account on the site.

Once that's done you'll have the option to go back and add feeds to your mix, along with the ability to edit your options.

But what about adding the mixed-up feed to your site? You get that by choosing "Get code to include this digest on your site", which offers you several options including JavaScript, PHP include, and code for RSS feed autodiscovery.

This service includes video demonstrations of how it works along with a very active blog. I guess the best word for the service would be "polished", but apparently there's plenty more to come. How about making that filtering option more overt in the creation process, and let the user put together a bunch of feeds right off the bat?

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