How to get a Daily Summary of your Overactive RSS feed?

An Overactive RSS feed (What is RSS?) like that of TechCrunch, delivers about 10 items everyday.  Consider 20 such RSS subscriptions and your RSS Reader can be cluttered in no time.  I am going to show you, how to get a Daily Summary of all posts from a RSS subscription.

Feedstomper is a utility developed by Jeremy Raines, that takes in the details of your RSS feed and provides an alternate feed that aggregates entries from the source RSS feed into a Daily summary.

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For instance, summarizing the RSS feed URL of TechCrunch, gives you the following alternate feed.

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Now you can subscribe to this alternate feed in your RSS Reader and receive a Daily Summary of all posts from TechCrunch.

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I suggest discretion in using this against all Overactive RSS feeds, as there can be a considerable time delay when the item reaches you.  This may not be suitable for News feeds, where the speed of item delivery matters.

RSS Subscribers and Blog Visitors

I was reading a post by Darren Rowse, analyzing the effect that RSS Readers have on the blog visitors.

I agree with him and following is my take on this topic.

1. Build a Community, forget the Traffic

One can have about 100 readers, visiting their blog but they may all be one-off readers. They find the blog uninteresting and never return. But RSS Readers help build a community. Once a reader find some interesting posts, they subscribe to the RSS feed, hoping to get more interesting posts from the blogger. By generating good posts, if the blogger manages to build a relationship, a community is born. A community of readers is essential for any blog and not the number of visitors

2. RSS Feeds convey the message, Crisp and Clean

Many a times, I find it lot easier and simpler, to read the posts through the reader than by directly visiting the blog. Also I have noticed that the average time taken to read the posts and understand the idea, is lot lesser in case of RSS Feeds

3. Optimize RSS Feeds for easier sharing

Using Feedflare, one can greatly improve the way that the feeds are rendered. It is possible to share the post via Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious etc., just at the click of a link. Also, Google Reader is wonderful in sharing good posts with a community of friends, thus spreading the message fast

4. Monetize using Google Adsense for Feeds

Google Adsense for Feeds is awesome. Many a times I have wondered at the relevance of the Ads to the post topic. Bloggers can leverage this to make money from blogging

So RSS feeds are a great way to share ideas and propogate them, really fast.