Many have announced the death of RSS, and Google Reader’s shutdown to come may comfort them in their thoughts, but RSS is not death. As a technology, it still powers many features of big and small websites, and many still use it to get updates from their favorite sites.
Let’s take a look at some great tools using RSS and some of the cool stuff you can do with it.
1. RSS Mix
A very easy to use tool to combine several RSS feeds and create a new one. The resulting feed can be requested in JSON to use in your web applications.
2. Yahoo Pipes
Another tool to work with feed and combines them. Yahoo Pipes is much more elaborated than RSS Mix and allows you to do more, like fetching CSV, auto-discovering feed,…
3. RSS Filter
RSS Filter is a PHP script that filters the contents of an RSS feed. The filters can be defined by the publisher so that the resulting RSS feed contains only the information they want.
4. Magpie
Magpie is a very popular RSS parser written in PHP. It is used by many popular open-source projects for RSS related features.
5. RSS 2 PDF
A free online tool to create PDFs from RSS feeds. You can create many cool things if you get creative, like creating PDFs from Google News feeds.
6. Feed Validator
An online tool to verify the validity of your RSS feeds.
7. OPML Validator
OPML, or Outline Processor Markup Language, is an XML format used for example by Google Reader for importing/exporting feed subscriptions. With this website you can check whether your OPML file is valid or not.
8. Ping-o-Matic
Ping-O-Matic is a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated.
9. Feedpass
A service that reformats your feed to make it more user-friendly and increase user engagement.
10. Custom Facebook feed
The Custom Facebook Feed is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display a customizable Facebook feed of any public Facebook page on your website.
11. Feedity
Feedity is a paid service that lets your create a RSS feed for any webpage instantly. Very practical for following static websites that don’t provide a feed.
12. SQL 2 RSS
The SQL2RSS script allows users to easily convert information that is stored in a database into an RSS feed, for syndication and distribution.
13. Feed Them Social
A WordPress plugin to easily add Instagram Feeds, Facebook Group Feeds, Twitter Feeds, and now YouTube Videos Feeds to any page, post or widget.
14. JS Ticker
A JavaScript script to add animated news tickers from RSS feeds on your website.
15. RSS Writer
If you don’t have a server that is able to generate RSS feeds, then you can manually create them with RSS Writer. All you need to do is upload the XML file once you have entered your content.
About the Author
Mirko Humbert
Mirko Humbert is the editor-in-chief and main author of Designer Daily and Typography Daily. He is also a graphic designer and the founder of WP Expert.