Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Saturday, October 23, 2004

Automatic Site-To-RSS Feed Creation: FeedFire

FeedFire is a breakthrough new service that allows anyone to create automatically a RSS news feed for any Web site that does not have one.

You simply register at FeedFire, input the URL of the page and FeedFire dos the rest for you in the fraction of a second. And it does work great too! FeedFire really helps you create, quickly, simply and with no prior expertise, RSS feeds from virtually ANY web page.

You need no programming knowledge or skills, no prior experience and you do not particularly need to know about the RSS protocols. FeedFire does it all for you, so you can quickly and speedily create a RSS feed.

All that's needed is a FULL URL to the page you would like to have made into RSS.

All bandwidth costs to host the new RSS feeds are absorbed by FeedFire.

FeedFire also allows to direct sponsorhip of newly created RSS feeds. this can be done by anyone like me and you, who are not major corporations but people who are looking for a clever, considered and comprehensively featured service that allows them to add extra reach, exposure, visibility and unique content to others and/or to THEIR own web site.

More advanced users may think of creating specialized premium channels into which they may not only place unique selection of news feeds they have crafted from ripping and mixing search queries and filtered news from the Web, news sources and the blogosphere, but in which they can now easily mix unique sites who DON'T have an RSS feed (while, if they want, keeping the RSS feed private to them).

I have tested FeedFire by creating RSS newsfeeds for three sites that never had one, and which I had contacted before and offered my free help to activate their own RSS channels without any results.

What in the past had costed me several emails, writing explanations and a good will in trying to explain the positive advantages for everyone when adding an extra distribution channel to any site, thans to FeedFire was now realized in a fraction of a second.

Here are three Web sites that had until now no official RSS feed:

Now, not only each one of these three sites as an RSS feed (both in RSS version 1 and 2.0), but they also have my sponsorship name on it!

Here they are:

That's right. FeedFire allows RSS feed creators to pay a fee that allows detailed control over the feed and optionally its full sponsorship.

So, since I found out about the service, have created RSS feeds for three sites who didn't have one, and already made those feeds available publicly through FeedFire (see home page, category or search pages) and Bloglines.com, I redistributed the benefits provided to those publishers (my cost for a year to do this is just above USD $110) by gently sponsoring with my own news resources their newly created RSS feeds which are available now to everyone online.

Not bad eh!

RSS feeds created and sponsored with FeedFire can also be made private, and used for creating intelligence reports or RSS learning objects or RSS newsmastering channels containing information otherwise inaccessible to others.

Sponsored feeds can be further filtered by allowing the sponsor to select only news items that "include" or do not have specific keywords. It is also possible to customize the number of news items displayed in the sponsored feed, the number of words per news item and even the title and the description of the newly created RSS feed. The varying levels of sponsorship have increasingly higher levels of features and customisation.

FeedFire free RSS feeds, only add some promotional information for Feeedfire, so that people using such freely created RSS feeds can themselves find out about the new service. Exactly as MyRSS (now Marketsentinel) had been doing long before and is about to continue doing.

FeedFire is very easy to use though it still have a few rough edges to refine. Most everything worked as expected and the only complain I have is a truly bizzarre post-payment screen that shows up after you have paid to sponsor a new RSS feed. This is certainly a small overlook that will be fixed in the coming hours.

This is a truly innovative and well thought out new RSS-based service.

Kudos to UK-based Mike Barlow and the team at Portrayer Publishers who has created this very promising new service called FeedFire.

Highly recommended.

 

 

Robin Good Recommends -
 
 
Readers' Comments    
2004-10-26 15:42:28

Jason Koulouras

Thanks for this update and information Robin - much appreciated

Cheers
Jason



 
posted by Robin Good on Saturday, October 23 2004, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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