Conquer that Gigantic RSS Feed.

There are a lot of blogs, forums, news posts out there. Sometimes, I prefer to the read the latest reviews and spoilers and other times I prefer to enter the contests. What can I say? I'm a volatile reader.

RSS feeds are a quick way to get a summary of what's being updated on a particular blog or forum, but they aren't always specific to the things I want to read. I'm looking at you, SpoilerTV.com, one RSS feed for 50+ shows?!

This is where Feedsifter comes in.  Oh Feedsifter, how do I love thee?  Well, actually there's just one way that I love thee, but it's fantastic.  Best of all, you are free and don't need a login!

So let's say you have a particularly large forum, blog, community that's giving you RSS entries up the wazoo.  Maybe you're only interested in a few keywords?  "Contests", "Bones Spoilers", "Timothy Olyphant"?  Feedsifter takes the RSS feed and spits out another RSS feed with only the entries that have your keywords.

This is particularly awesome for gossip columns, TV blogs, coupons for brands I actually like, as I don't want to waste another second looking at my RSS feed and finding out Lindsay Lohan has been in jail again, but I wouldn't mind reading about the 20% off coupon for Macys--know what I'm saying?

So, copy the link for the RSS feed, paste that line into Feedsifter, enter the keywords, and watch your huge RSS feeds shrink to just the entries you want to read.  It's sweet, sweet RSS feeds as they were meant to be, short and oh so relevant to your interests.

Simple. Beautiful.

Just the latest spoilers for Castle and Bones, leaves the rest out of my 'sifted' RSS feed.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Feedsifter is awesome

Now my RSS feeds are too!

Price Watch & Update Watch on Firefox

One of the best things about Firefox is its extensions, and I've discovered one so awesome that I'm going to start my inaugural post on it:

AlertBox

For watching prices on any website and for getting updates on websites without RSS...this is the best. I never have to check a store's website to see if the price went down, or check a website over and over to see if there's new content. Alertbox tells me when there's new content.

Compare to UpdateScanner, which is, I admit, a little easier to use, Alertbox is much more specific. UpdateScanner tells you if anything on a website has changed.  But usually, I only care about the price on a website, not about the banners, or the other text, JUST THE PRICE, mon ami!

So after you install Alertbox, you need to do a little something extra.  Highlight the price (or the date, or the post number, anything that will indicate new content), then right click, "add alert" and choose "For changes on clicked element".  Now your browser will work extra hard in the background, checking daily (or minutely, hourly, weekly, etc) to see if there any changes. Whenever there's a change, a little pop-up shows up at the corner, you click on it, and it tells you what's been changed. It save you time & money...and it's free.

ACK!  Price increase!

See when new contests are posted!

BEST EXTENSION EVER. 

Anyone want to see it in action? :D