RSS Feeds to Newsletters and Specializing the Feed

I got a very nice e-mail from a lady in Australia asking how the ResearchBuzz newsletters were done. Did I have a method, she asked, of converting my RSS feed to a newsletter?

The answer to that is no; the newsletter is done separately from the RSS feed, one day a week, hopefully on Thursday morning before I have breakfast and go to work.

She was asking because her company is looking at ways to distribute information, and there's an interest in both RSS feeds and newsletters. RSS feeds would be useful, but some people don't want to install RSS feed readers or really really REALLY want to stick to e-mail. At the same time, they might not be interested in everything from a particular RSS feed.

So, she asked, how to set up RSS feeds so that have only the items in which the recipient is interested and are sent to them by e-mail?

Of course, setting up specialized RSS feeds is easy if you're using a resource which generates keyword-based RSS feeds (like Google News, Yahoo News, Feedster, etc.) If you're using static feeds it's a little tougher, but still possible. You'll need to use two different tools.

Specialty RSS Feeds Via E-Mail

1) Pick the feeds you want to monitor and put them on one line, like this:

http://www.researchbuzz.com/researchbuzz.rss http://www.resourceshelf.com/resourceshelf.xml http://www.librarystuff.net/index.rdf

(By the way, it looks like if you append your search for a blog title with the words RSS feed, Google knows enough to pop up the RSS feed first thing. It worked for that phrase in conjunction with LibraryStuff, ResourceShelf, LibrarianinBlack, Megnut, Little Yellow Different, etc.)

2) Go to FeedShake at http://www.feedshake.com/ . (yes, this is partially the same advice I gave to Squidward about finding podcasts.) Enter your line o' feeds that you made. Choose a title and a link. Enter words that must appear in the feed or words you want to exclude (that you don't want to appear in the feed.) Remember, not all feeds are full-text so it's better to be more general (Google) than more specific (Matt Cutts.)

3) Take the feed you've generated to RSSFwd ( http://www.rssfwd.com ). Enter it in the submission box and hit submit. Check out the preview (when I did it, it took a minute because it had to be generated). If it looks good enter the e-mail address where you'd like to receive updates and away you go.

There you have several RSS feeds, gotten by e-mail, limited to the topics in which you're interested.

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