I was browsing the BBC web site today and came across a really clever use of RSS. The BBC allows you to create your own RSS feed based on content stored on their web site.
You use the BBC search engine to find the content you’re interested in and then subscribe to the search results. This is a clever way to subscribe to a very specific subject, rather than the more generic BBC News or BBC Sports feeds that are offered.
I would like to see this feature offered on other web sites. Some RSS feeds I subscribe to cover a very broad spectrum of news where I might only be interested in certain subject areas.
The ability to fine tune an RSS feed would be an asset on any web site where a large quantity of content is published. I could see people liking this.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 AL // Jan 27, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Exactly!
I have like 150 subscriptions in my Google Reader. Every morning I go through 100+ only to filter out about 10% of interesting ones. I would really appreciate if there was some kind of way to filter the results based on keywords or categories.
2 Dean // Jan 27, 2007 at 10:05 pm
I know the feeling. I got to the point where I was subscribed with too many sites. It started to become a daily chore trying to filter out the useful content.
In the end I reduced my number of subscriptions, using criteria such as number of posts published each day. I now only subscribe to sites that produce less than 10 articles a day. This keeps things to a manageable number, but it does run the risk that I may miss out on useful material.
One day I must do some research in this area and see if there is a better way to organize my subscriptions. Thanks for visiting my site.
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