Feedmarklet Builds RSS Feeds Painlessly

As a web worker, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the benefits of consuming RSS; that simple (though sometimes maligned) XML format delivers a raft of information direct to our desktops. In my own life, I use RSS to track everything from friends’ activities to the status of build servers to who’s been updating wikis to source code checkins. We’ve looked at many ways to read RSS feeds in the past, and we’ll surely look at more in the future.

Feedmarklet tackles the other side of the RSS equation, with the easiest solution for creating RSS feeds (specifically, RSS feeds pointing to resources on the web) that I’ve yet seen. Creating a new feed with Feedmarklet takes about ten seconds; you type in a name for the feed and then drag a bookmarklet button to your browser toolbar. When you browse to a page you want to add to your feed, highlight the text you want to use as a description and then click the bookmarklet button. Up pops a form filled in with the page title, URL, and description (all of which you can edit); one more click and the item is added to the feed.

To my mind, this is a better solution for building a feed than using the daily dump of del.icio.us bookmarks that many folks do, simply because it’s easier to get good descriptions associated with feed items. The potential drawback? Feedmarklet feeds are public resources, so anyone else who wants to set up the same bookmarklet can add items to “your” feed as well.

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