Create lean and mean RSS feeds with Feed Rinse

Here's an oldie but a goodie. Feed Rinse is a super simple and user-friendly way to tweak RSS feeds before subscribing to them in your favorite reader tool.

With it you can pick which authors or keywords you want to exclude, giving you complete control over what ends up filling your feed reader. For example, on Webware's RSS feed you could very quickly choose to only get posts about Google (which is possible on our main site using tags), or a handful of keywords at the same time.

Hate reading a certain blogger? Choose to block or otherwise filter posts by keyword, title, author, and more with Feed Rinse.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As Martin over at Ghacks points out, you could accomplish a similar feat on Yahoo's Pipes service, although I found Feed Rinse to be dramatically easier to use. It's a lot like programming a smart playlist in iTunes, with simple drop-down menus, instead of Pipes' system which requires you to create programming strings.

One thing worth mentioning is that Feed Rinse is smart enough to know you're going to take your newly created RSS feed elsewhere, and as such has special links that will send your feed out to various reader services like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, and others. There's also a bookmarklet that lets you tweak the RSS feed on any site you're on with one click. Both are nice touches that save you time.

Feed Rinse is completely free to use, although you're limited to creating and managing just 500 filters per user account. The service previously had a premium and plus plans, however these disappeared two years ago in place of a unified offering.

(via Ghacks)

[MagnoliaSouth]

In theory this sounds good. The problem is what it is looking at. Is it only the text of the post, or the entire page to include comments? For example, I could care less about reading Mac posts. I don't have a Mac, I won't have a Mac... you get the idea. Let's say there is a post on a productivity tool. The post might say that it works on both Mac and Windows OR maybe it says only Windows but a commenter posts "hey, it works great on a Mac too." Then I've lost the post. Granted, I suppose I could add a Windows keyword but you see my point. It could turn into a keyword nightmare fairly quickly.

[Josh.Lowensohn]

It only takes the information from the feed itself. The comment section is not currently available on Feed Rinse, only on the entire post, title, author, body and included tags.

[rocjoe]

At last! I've been jonesing for a service like this for a long, long time... iPhone, you are *so banned* from my RSS feeds-- yay!