* RSS development tools from ExtraLabs
In many organizations, keeping company members up to speed on business news and market intelligence is difficult. E-mail has been a popular vehicle but as the volume of work-related messaging has increased exponentially, e-mail overload has reduced the value of the medium for news distribution.
The up-and-coming alternative for news distribution is news feeds using RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Summary; see the Wikipedia definition) or ATOM (which, rather disappointingly, stands for nothing; see this Wikipedia entry).
A couple of issues ago, I discussed a couple of tools for creating feeds. Today, I have a suite of tools that add lots of options to how feeds can be constructed and managed.
These tools are published by ExtraLabs Software and include RSS Wizard, an HTML to RSS converter; Feed Editor, which allows you to create and modify a feed; and Feed Mix, a tool to assemble a feed from other feeds.
RSS Wizard takes an HTML document as its input and using either standard tags (such as
or any custom comment tags (for example, along with ) will create an RSS feed. RSS Wizard concludes the process with a publishing step that can save to a local file or using the built-in FTP client, publish to a server.Feed Editor may well be the first WYISWYG RSS editor. You can also directly edit the raw HTML and export the feed to ATOM 3.0 format, a comma separated variable file, a file in HTML page or HTML table format, a file with a JavaScript-based table, a text file, and an RSS 2.0 feed.
To go with this, ExtraLabs provides Feed2Html, a free PHP script that can convert RSS feeds into Web pages using design templates. Feed2Html is bundled with Feed Editor and can be downloaded from ExtraLabs.
Feed Mix is a feed browser that can copy individual items from a feed and merge them into a new feed. Feed Mix allows WYSIWYG editing and supports posting directly to blogs, FTP transfer, exporting to all of the same formats as Feed Editor, and exporting to OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language).
Feed Editor is priced at $25.95 per seat, RSS Wizard at $22.46, and Feed Mix at $32.47. If you can’t get a decent RSS feed system running with those tools, you simply aren’t trying.
