Free online convertion of pages into RSS feed

Again I am a big fan of Flipboard the best free application to read news on iOS and Android. I am also a big fan of SkimFeed which I also like to read for my daily news. Unfortunately the two of them do not work well because SkimFeed does not provide any RSS feed.

Fortunately there is a great free service named Feed43 which does exactly what we need, but it is not really immediately straightforward how to use it.

  1. Create a new feed here, and put the url you want into the address box, you can leave the encoding box empty, and click Reload. I used http://skimfeed.com/latest.php?c=1
  2. In global search pattern just put {%}
  3. In item search pattern, identify the link, name and information you want to publish in your RSS feed and identify them with {%}. I used <a href=’http://skimfeed.com/{%}'{*}title='{%}'{*}</a> – {%}<br> where the first {%} identified the url suffix, the second {%} identified the title, and the third {%} identified where the link comes from. Click Extract to test your rules.
  4. Fill the title, link and description. Note that the link will be used as a prefix for your links. So in my case I use http://skimfeed.com/ which I skipped during the search
  5. Enter {%1}, {%2}, etc. into the item title template, item link template, and item content template boxes. Where {%1} was the first {%} from the search pattern, and as follow. So in my case I used {%2} in item title template, {%1} in item link template, and {%3} in item content template.
  6. Click Preview. If everything worked as expected you should have a nice preview of the resulting RSS feed and a link to use (http://feed43.com/1746038366683264.xml in my case).
  7. Enter manually that full URL into Flipboard and you are done!

I also made another one for Freshnews.org: http://feed43.com/3421254840553503.xml

Aggregating multiple RSS feeds into another RSS feed

I am a big fan of Flipboard the best free application to read news on iOS and Android. I am also a big fan of Freshnews.org which I read every morning to get my daily pulse of the tech universe. Unfortunately the two of them do not work well because Freshnews.org does not provide a useful RSS feed and just provides the most clicked feed.

So I had to build my own and for that I simply used the free RSSMix, you basically provide a list of URLs of the feeds you want to aggregate and it provides you a url of the resulting mix.

For example for freshnews.org I collected all the following feeds:

http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot/to
http://feeds.feedburner.com/cnet/NnTv
http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/recent/
http://www.reddit.com/.rss
http://www.gizmodo.com/index.xml
http://freecode.com/?format=atom
http://mobile.engadget.com/rss.xml
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/tech
http://www.techdirt.com/techdirt_rss.xml
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/everything
http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.atom
http://www.theinquirer.net/feeds/rss/type/news
http://www.amazon.com/gp/rss/movers-and-shakers/electronics/ref=zg_bsms_electronics_rsslink
http://feeds.feedburner.com/thenextweb
http://gigaomnetwork.com/feed/
http://www.osnews.com/files/recent.xml
http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
http://www.techmeme.com/index.xml
http://www.digitaltrends.com/feed/
http://feeds.gawker.com/lifehacker/full
http://techcrunch.com/feed/
http://feedproxy.google.com/CrunchGear
http://feeds.feedburner.com/neowin-main
http://feeds.gawker.com/io9/full
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskMetafilter
http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index
http://www.tuaw.com/rss.xml
http://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/rss2/tom-s-hardware-us,18-1.xml
http://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All

I entered all of them into RSSMix with a simple copy and paste. RSSMix produced a useable url (http://www.rssmix.com/u/3627315/rss.xml) that I manually entered into Flipboard and everything worked!