Test post

Sorry for this post: I'm changing a bit the Feeling Black layout and I need to check how the many services I use (FeedBurner, Google AdSense and so on) integrate.

xFruits: RSS from/to everything

xFruits.com is a very interesting service that permits to exploit the potential of your RSS feeds. Their site exposes some very interesting services based on RSS feeds:

• Feed to PDF
• Feed to Mobile
• Feed to Mail
• Mail to Feed
• Feed to Voice (!)
• Feed to OPML
• OPML to Mobile
  
• and, of course, feeds aggregation

But, above all, it permits to "chain" these services by building very useful mashups.
i.e. You can build a chain made of "Mail to Feed" + "Feed to Mobile" that lets you check your mail from your mobile phone.
The most impressive mashup it's probably RSS to Voice (powered by VocalFruits) which lets you create podcasts from blog posts, mail messages ("Mail to feed" + "Feed to Voice") and so on.
Available voices are English, French and Spanish, but you need a (paid) account at VocalFruits. This is a bad news/good news: when you create the account at VocalFruits you will be credited with 100 free vocal credits (I think each credit is equivalent to the conversion of, e.g. , one feed), so you have the possibility of evaluating this service before you invest some money.

Finally, these guys are continuously improving and creating new options for you to use with your feeds.

Secret resources

I'm too tired to write a tutorial, but I have some secret resources I want to share with you:
this, this one and this beautiful service too.

Feed43: build an RSS feed from plain HTML

When you need to provide an RSS feed to a web-site you aren't able to edit (i.e. you are nor the admin, nor one of the maintainers of this web-site), well, if this is your case, the service I'm going to describe is the solution you were looking for.

Feed43 is a pretty useful service: it satisfied my demands without the need for me to know nor the XML schema of the RSS standard, nor any other particular notion.

It lets define a parsing schema of an HTML page by using a simple wizard. After I entered the site for creating a feed, I suddenly switched to "Advanced mode" and I found this advanced mode being both powerful and simple to understand.
Just a thing may be a bit obscure: hot to use the "{%}" or "{*}" template tags.
I personally used just "{%}" and then, after looking at the assigned numbers in the "Clipped data" text-area, I provided "{%1}" or "{%2}" to, respectively, the "Item title template" and "Item content template".

But, you know, the better way to understand how it works is to try yourself...

This service really fitted my needs, allowing me to build a feed up in less than 10 minutes.