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Saturday, December 30, 2006

FeedChopper: Turn any long document into a daily RSS feed

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For the past day I have been building a new web service called FeedChopper. Basically you paste in a long web article or list of links or quotations, and it gives you an RSS feed that delivers one section (or link or quotation) each day to your feedreader.

Screenshot

I created it because I'll often come across some long article or tutorial and I don't have an hour to read it in its entirety. Or someone will recommend a good collection of links, but it would be overwhelming to read them all in one sitting. With FeedChopper I get the information in daily bite-sized pieces.

(FeedChopper is also a good simple demo of the Ruby-on-Rails-like PHP framework that we use for new apps at Ning. View the source code.)

My hope is that by chopping up long articles into daily "lessons", this service will be useful to busy people who love to learn.

11 Comments:

  • Hey Paul - Glad you like it! Perhaps I should continue to use templates developed by others instead of coming up with my own colour schemes ;-)

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 12/30/2006 7:36 p.m.  

  • CloCkWeRX - Hm! Actually I wasn't aware of Bookfeed - that will come in handy when I need to plow through longer works like e-books.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 12/30/2006 10:52 p.m.  

  • Thanks, Phil - Hope it's useful to you!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 1/01/2007 10:11 a.m.  

  • Another related service, for e-books: http://blog.dailylit.com

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 1/01/2007 10:12 a.m.  

  • Oh man, something like this has been on my todo list for ages. Nice work.

    By Blogger Thomas David Baker, at 1/02/2007 9:20 a.m.  

  • bakert - Wonderful! Hope it can be of use!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 1/02/2007 9:38 a.m.  

  • FeedChopper uses the idea of "time-shifted feeds", in which you pick the start date for the feed.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 1/02/2007 10:12 a.m.  

  • Terrific!

    By Blogger David Gelbart, at 1/08/2007 4:27 p.m.  

  • Hi David - Long time no see!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 1/08/2007 6:35 p.m.  

  • Jonathon,

    What am I doing wrong with FeedChopper? I visited the site I wanted to create the RSS Feed (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/) and entered it in the URL and titled the feed Earth Observatory. Hit create new feed and ... nothing. If a feed is created it is gone. I do not put any text in, just the URL. I use Mozilla Firefox. I really enjoy your blog. You do great work.

    By Blogger Mr Minton, at 1/09/2007 6:15 a.m.  

  • Hello Mr. Minton - Actually, the text is what gets turned into a feed (one feed item per line).

    The Earth Observatory has an email newsletter that you can subscribe to at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/subscribe.php3 . If you wanted to turn that into a feed, I think there are some email-to-RSS services out there.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 1/09/2007 8:19 p.m.  

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