Help Me Find a Public RSS Reader!

January 21, 2007 2:38 PM

Is there a website, online reader or service that will allow me to aggregate a number of RSS feeds and share them on a single page available to the public?

I am teaching a class and would like to set up a page that allows all of my students to keep tabs on a set of feeds I select. Thus far the closest that I have been able to find is to create a Yahoo 360 profile, but that only allows up to three feeds to be displayed. Google Reader also comes close with their public page options but you have to manually go in and choose which posts you want to share, something that is unmanageable for this purpose.

I've also looked into Rollyo, Diigo, Yahoo MyWeb, Squidoo and others but none of these seem to offer exactly what I'm looking for. This seems like something that has to exist so please, I beg of you, help me find it!

posted by phixed to computers & internet (17 comments total)

Have a look at netvibes, which allows you to save rss feeds then publish them as a tab
posted by kenchie at 2:44 PM on January 21, 2007

Bloglines lets you publish your blogroll to the public.
posted by brianvan at 2:45 PM on January 21, 2007

Livejournal will let you, as well as Wordpress — there is a plugin if you have a blog on your own server running Wordpress.

From the examples you've mentioned you seem to be looking at "personal home pages." Try that search term. Netvibes is a good one. It's hard to tell exactly what you want though. Why not just create an account in Bloglines or some other online feed reader and share the login info with the class.
posted by Brittanie at 2:47 PM on January 21, 2007

Feed on Feeds, if you have access to a server.
posted by zamboni at 3:07 PM on January 21, 2007

Netvibes = seconded.
posted by jbiz at 3:26 PM on January 21, 2007

I'm on netvibes and while I love it, is it possible to get an absolute URL that will show my homepage to anybody without them having to login?

FWIW, I wish Google would buy this and fix up their personalized homepages, btw. :)
posted by phixed at 3:37 PM on January 21, 2007

If you use livejournal you only need to send out a single URL to your class, no logins or server space required. send them to yourusername.livejournal.com/friends and all the latest entries of all your feeds will show up one after another.

it might look a bit tricky to figure out how to add feeds to your friends page. and also if you have a free account you can only add feeds that have already been added to livejournal, you have to be a paid member to add new ones. here is their faq entry so you can see if this is what you want.
posted by amethysts at 3:41 PM on January 21, 2007

brianvan: I tried this but would prefer to have it in a Netvibes/MyYahoo type format.

Brittanie: I thought about this but would prefer not to have to create a blog from scratch and figure out the appropriate plugins necessary to do this.

zamboni: No access, but thanks for the suggestion.
posted by phixed at 3:47 PM on January 21, 2007

amethysts: Thanks for the suggestion! I don't know why I didn't consider LJ. I'll try this out next.
posted by phixed at 3:48 PM on January 21, 2007

FeedBite might work for you.

And here are some others that allow you to merge feeds:
BlogDigger
FeedBlendr
FeedDigest
FeedJumbler
FeedShake
posted by sexymofo at 4:20 PM on January 21, 2007

PageFlakes is great for what you want. Looks nicer and cleaner than NetVibes.
posted by HotPatatta at 4:48 PM on January 21, 2007

SuprGlu? I like it... and for this purpose less fluff than PageFlakes, NetVibes, etc.
posted by tmcw at 4:53 PM on January 21, 2007

I love SuprGlu to bits, but;
(1) It's dying. They haven't done anything to improve it for a long time, I think the creators have moved onto other project, which is a shame because I think the site would be very popular if they promoted it a little bit more.
(2) They make it clear that it's intended to present your own content (RSS feeds of your Flickr photos, your Metafilter posts, your blog entires) rather than third party content.
posted by Jimbob at 5:15 PM on January 21, 2007

Gregarius

An open source app that you can download and host yourself. You can set the home page to be public. It's also template driven so you could customize the look if that's important to you.
posted by DIYer at 7:04 PM on January 21, 2007

Wait a minute. Why can't Google Reader do this?

You mention having to choose which items to share, which is true, for their custom-generated public "Shared Items" feed.

But you can assign all the feeds you want to aggregate to a specific tag/label (Google, make up your mind!), and then designate that tag/label as public. Voila, a "Shared Items" page and feed that contains everything coming through on any of those tagged/labeled feeds.

Example: I have a tag/label in Google Reader called "blogroll." In it are about two dozen feeds. I set that tag/label as public, and it gives me this. I'm not manually flagging anything... that's all recent items in those feeds.

(I just wish Google Reader would have a more traditional "blogroll" function, where I could list everything at the site/feed/source level, perhaps sorted by last update, rather than individual items from each mixed together. But that's another issue entirely.)
posted by pzarquon at 7:19 PM on January 21, 2007 [2 favorites]

ajarr will do this for you.

http://ajarr.com/

It's free. You can have as many feeds and tabs as you want. You can even take your feeds and display them on a different website by including a bit of HTML.

Your public url will be located at http://ajarr.com/username

You may mark feeds/tabs as private in the event you do not wish that they appear on your public page however, the default is public.

You can check out my ajarr public page here: http://ajarr.com/zack

In the interests of full disclosure ajarr is a service that I am involved in the development of.

I really hope this doesn't come off spammy, but ajarr seems to do everything you are looking for. I hope you come to the same conclusion!
posted by zackola at 2:08 PM on January 22, 2007

Hi all,

In case people find this post and are looking for a similar solution, I can't recommend Yahoo Pipes highly enough. A fantastic tool that did exactly what I wanted and was extremely easy to set up.

Thanks again for everybody that contributed to this thread!

-Adam
posted by phixed at 9:41 PM on February 13, 2007