RSS Tools for your blog - Part 2

Also, read the first part of this mini series.

In the first part of this mini series I had described how to publish and validate the feed of your blog. In this section I will discuss feed readers and how to use these data to generate autodata for your blogs.

(3) Feed Readers
If you want to generate quality content for your blogs you must get into a habbit of reading others' blogs. The best way to do that on the fly is to subscribe to many blogs' feeds. This is where the feedreaders come into picture. These provide you with a search option to find new feeds ; if you have a feed its really easy to subscribe to that field in these readers. Newsgator and Google Reader are the most popular ones. You can also use offline readers like FeedDemon.

(4) Generating data from your RSS
You can generate HTML/JavaScript to add widgets to your blog using the feeds of others or even your own feeds. The data will be updated automatically so you dont need to do any work for the data being generated. In blogger, their is an option to do this automatically( Go to Templates-->Edit Layout--> use a feed-->enter feed URL). If you are using other platforms use your feedburner accounts to convert it to html.(see feedburner instructions in part 1)
Some useful feeds for this purpose can be:

• Del.icio.us feed: If you have your bookmarks or material which you want to share on delicious; its pretty easy to generate a feed for it. See this page for more details. Now this feed can generate data for you :).
• Google Reader feed: By selecting share in google reader for some of the subscribed feed items, you can get a feed from Google. This can be used as the same way above. The Google feed has some problem with certain services. If you have faced a similar problem, do write back.

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