How to: Use FeedRinse to filter an RSS feed
Sometimes a feed is good, but you want only some of the entries it will contain. In these circumstances, it can be helpful to filter a feed. This post will show how to filter a feed using FeedRinse, a service that allows you to sign up for a free account and filter five feeds, gratis.
For our example, we’ll use the Ulcerative Colitis feed from medworm.com (Look for more on Medworm in future posts).
This feed’s URL is http://www.medworm.com/rss/medicalfeeds/conditions/Ulcerative-Colitis.xml. This feed will not only contain references to Ulcerative Colitis in the medical journals indexed in MEDLINE and searchable by PubMed, but will also contain items from a number of professional and consumer health news sources.
In our example, we want a feed to alert us any time there are any articles about therapies or treatments for Ulcerative Colitis.
Here’s how we do this:
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Go to http://feedrinse.com/
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Sign up
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Choose the Free Account (limited to 5 feeds)
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Click Let’s get started button.
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Add Feed URL and click Import button.
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Click on Set up rules button
We want Therapy or Treatment, so we set the conditions for it.
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We allow the post if any of the following conditions are met:
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post contains therapy
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post contains treatment
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Click Save changes.
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To add this rinsed feed to BlogLines (or your favorite aggregator), cick on the RSS symbol (1), then choose your aggregator from the drop-down menu (2).
A BlogLines tab opens up, and all I must do is click on the Subscribe button.
Here’s how this filtered feed looks in BlogLines:
Do check out FeedRinse’s other neat features, it does some cool things with OPML files.
Anyone use a competing tool to filter feeds? I’d love to hear about them and try them out!
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January 8th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
[...] 4. Filter your feeds Marjolein and John Tropea also recommend using feed filtering to make sure you only see the posts from a feed that relate to a topic you care about. For instance, you might use Feed Digest, FeedShake, or FeedRinse to do this quickly and easily. Check out this post for step-by-step instructions on how to do it. Also, I just linked a few days ago to a good article on feed filtering that is worth reading. [...]
August 28th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
[...] FeedRinse (mashing and/or filtering; step-by-step tutorial here) [...]