Mohtalim

So it seems to me that there must be one or perhaps a whole host of websites which maintain directories of RSS feeds and let you customize some kind of a home page with RSS feeds you select. I am interested in both the discovery and aggregration of RSS feeds, and ideally they should be combined. For optimal results, discovery should include a search function.

Has anyone heard of anything like this?

For example, LJ lets you select RSS feeds as Friends so when you view your Friends page, you can see all the RSS feeds aggregrated into a single page. This is lovely. You can see I've added Calvin and Hobbes, Boondocks, and Get Fuzzy feeds. However, LJ's implementation suffers from certain severe limitations. First, to decrease server load, free LJ users have a limit on the number of feeds they can view. Second, discovery consists of a (moderately) big list. I'm looking for something a bit more robust.

http://blogspace.com/rss/readers

A list of RSS aggregators. Looks like there's some web-based ones, a Mozilla one, and a couple of standalone jobs. I'll poke at it for a bit and see what there is to see. The more I think about it, the more I would like to have a single web page, preferably on my web site, that I look at in the morning to see what's new.

Currently I have a group of tabs bookmark under Mozilla that I check MWF and most other days too. This is great, but fully half the sites don't update between my checks. I can do better. The eventual goal, of course, is to increase the total number of sites I pay attention to without altering the number of minutes I spend reading them.

http://www.syndic8.com/

A database of feeds. Putting this together with the RSS readers may eventually yield what I want.

Hmm, I get the general idea of what RSS is, but more importantly, I know the following site uses it (and has for a long long time)

http://anime.mircx.com/

However, can anyone recommend sites about RSS itself if I wanted to learn more? (don't feel like browsing through multiple google sites)

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

It's a standardized format for screen-scraping, basically.

Ok, I'm trying to understand what an RSS feed is. Is the feed just a file that keeps getting new "items" appended to it? Does a reader just keep track of where it was and knows that anything added is new? I'm just not quite getting the architectural setup of it all.

http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss

Just a file. A file with a regular format, so that code can parse it easily. Part of the structure includes the date and time, so all the content is well-ordered.