A post on TechCrunch (“FeedXS – RSS for Everyone“) pointed me to FeedXS. This is a new service that claims to make it simple for anyone to create an RSS feed. While blog tools are common, this lets you generate a feed without a blog via either a simple web form or MSN Messenger. Although this sort of service can easily be kludged together using a basic web form and tools like the XML::RSS Perl module, it requires some programming skills to do so. FeedXS offers free personal accounts and for-fee business accounts; it’s not clear to me where not-for-profits fall into their pricing mix.
While many libraries are jumping right in to the blogosphere, some others may not want to bother with yet another web site to maintain. Or there might be short-term special purpose feeds that don’t need the overhead of a full-fledged weblog. Weekly questions for a reading group could be posted this way, or perhaps “fun facts about the library” — something that interested patrons would like to see and could add to their aggregators.
Feeds without a Blog
[Via TechCrunch.]
Hi Ken,
This is an interesting service. Another alternative, and I’m curious what you think of this… As a quick-n-dirty solution, couldn’t a free blogger account be shut down to public access, and used exclusively for the RSS feed? (Running Blogger’s atom file through Feedburner would convert it to RSS 2.0 if necessary)
If one wanted full control, I’m sure WordPress (or another blog/CMS software) could also be shut down from publishing too, and used for the RSS feed.
Just an idea,
Steve
Steve,
The methods you propose all sound reasonable to me — but I suspect I’m a bit more of a geek than many of my librarian colleagues might be. There’s no dearth of ways to get to an RSS feed, but what I like about this service, in particular, is that it doesn’t require any of the kludging (or hand-coding an RSS feed, which is no picnic — that’s the voice of experience talking).
Ken
There are also some software programs that do this as well like ListGarden (http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/listgarden/index.html). I haven’t used ListGarden myself though.
Feed XS
RSS4Lib features Netherlands-based Feed XS , a tool which allows people to create the content for RSS feeds, to publish something directly as a feed.