Giovy's Blog

La versione italiana è qui: Feedrinse

Sometime I still get surprised by the “web 2.0” services that continues to be launched every single day.
Feed Rinse is one of them… 😛

Many of you are using RSS feeds (of which I have talked about many times in this blog) to read blogs, follow information sites/portals and similar.
When you follow just a bunch of them there’s no problem, all it’s easy and fine …. BUT … if the number of feed you follow begin to grow, keeping up becomes hard and complicated, mainly because the signal to noise factor get polluted by “rumors”.
This happens because we, of course, maybe not be interested in every single post of a blog as we can not be interested in every single news provided by a news agency. So keeping away this “unwanted” information to someone becomes a prority to someone.
But, how do we achieve this?
Feed Rinse comes in help, giving us the chance to “filter” the RSS feeds of the information sourcers we follow, showing us only the type of articles that meets our criteria.

How does Feed Rinse work?
The concept behind it is really simple: we set up Feed Rinse with the RSS we usually follow (yes, we can import the eventual OPML file we have from exporting the feeds from another client), then we can go on and set the “filters” on the feeds we want to “lighten up”.
We, first of all, can decide if ALLOW or BLOCK the posts thet match our rules; rules that can be applied to:

• post
• title
• body
• author
• tag

to permit an effective filtering of the contents. For example it’s possible, for a certain feed, only the posts that contains the word “giovy” and not show the posts that have a “politics” tag. And so on.
Once we have set out the filters for each feed we can export back all of them in a new OPML file (that we will import back in our default feed reader) and this time we will have a list “filtered” to our tastes. Obviously the filtering rules can be modified in teal time, following the needs of the moment. If your feed reader supports the function you can also generate an OPML Reading List.

How much does Feed Rinse costs?
Several “plans” are availables, each one with it’s limits and set of functionalities, trying to cope with the various profile of users.
There is a FREE (as in beer) plan that allow you to filter up to five feeds, a CHEAP one that allows the filtering of 50 feeds maximum and costs 1$/month, a PLUS one up to 100 filters and costs 3$/month and an UNLIMITED one which permits up to 500 filtersand costs 5$/month.
From the CHEAP plan on, is also active the possibility to filter the feeds using Regular Expression and it’s availble a filter on “trivial” content.

To test the service I’ve activated the FREE plan and I must admit I am satisfied with the functionalities and effectiveness: I’ve made disappear from the ANSA and Repubblica feed every article with the words “prodi” and “berlusconi” in the bodies and title… 😀

Translation by Nicola “kOoLiNuS” Losito.