RSS Everywhere Else

There are sites (many, many sites) that generate RSS feeds. There are many places you can use them. Here's just a brief diagram to kick-start your thinking about how and where to use them. 

Feedly is an RSS reader. This is a program where you enter the RSS feeds of the informational websites you want to keep up with and it pulls in the latest items and presents them to you in a format like a personalized newspaper front page. Google really popularized these a few years back with their Google Reader. Lots of people loved it, but then Google pulled the plug in 2013 to everyone's surprise.

Zapier looks a lot if ifttt.com (see our article) and they claim to have 100 "zaps" or processes to handle RSS feeds. Some are interesting, like:

• create an RSS feed of new track for artists you follow on SoundCloud
• create an RSS feed from a Google Spreadsheet
• receive and SMS text when one of your favorite RSS feeds is updated
• create an RSS feed of new Google Docs in a folder
• post new GitHub notifications on an RSS feed

and so on. Zapier's claim to fame seems to be that they've figured out all the APIs for all types of Google documents and can trigger just about anything off of them.

As to pricing, there's a free plan that gives you 5 zaps and 100 notifications per month, just enough to get your feet wet. Then $20, $50, $75 and $125 per month. ZAP!

I like using ifttt.com, which stands for "if this, then that." It can take data from lots of sources and do things with it. They call these procedures recipes. Yes, it can do things with RSS. When I checked, I found 24 Recipes using RSS. These do things like

• take your instagram photos and store them to OneDrive
• send you an email when a new item appears in an RSS feed
• put a feedly article into a category on pocket
• take an item from feedly with a specific tag and post them to your WordPress blog

and so it goes. Take a look and browse around.