Well, it has been a busy few days since we launched but it is wonderful to see all the activity around AideRSS and to receive so many e-mails from people. Many of the e-mails contain great ideas and feature requests but some are also to ask questions about our site and how things work.
I’ve decided to recap some of these questions here to help others who may be wondering the same things. In no particular order here are some of the most common inquiries;
Do I have to use “My Feeds” or can I read my feeds in my favorite feed reader?
Indeed, AideRSS was never designed to be a fully-featured feed reader to compete with either online feed readers such as Google Reader or desktop application feed readers such as Feed Demon. Our emphasis is on the filtering of your RSS streams – reducing the onslaught of irrelevant posts coming to your inbox and ensuring that you get the good posts and are reading what is being noticed and talked about.
We have provided “My Feeds” as a basic online reader should people choose to read their filtered streams at our site but we envision that most people will instead subscribe to AideRSS filtered streams and have them delivered right to their favourite feed reader. To learn how to do this please see our Screencast – My Feeds & RSS Filtering.
Is there a duplicate removal or something to eliminate redundant feeds?
The ability remove multiple redundant feeds is something that we are going to work to provide in upcoming versions of AideRSS. Please look for it in the future (though perhaps not the near future).
Can I request a feature to group feeds into categories and help me be organized by sorting things?
We’ve had a number of requests for the ability to provide categories, channels, or other ways to allow more specific individual filtering and organization. I’m not sure where this one will end up in the development priorities because there can be a lot of complexity regarding creating a simple and effective user interface but we will work on it.
Can I use AideRSS filtered streams on my site?
Certainly! Not only do we allow you to use AideRSS filtered feeds from our site on your blog or website, we even provide a variety of AideRSS widgets to help make it incredibly easy.
You can find an overview of this widget on our Screencast – Best Posts Widget. In less than two minutes it will provide you an overview of the widget tool, show you how to create an AideRSS filtered feed (for example your own Best Posts), and then how to add it to the homepage of your site. It is easy to do and can really help your readers find your best stuff.
You can see examples of our widget in use at sites like ReadWrite Web and learn more at our widgets page.
How do I read or where can I find the posts that AideRSS has filtered out?
We could try to provide streams of cut out stories (everything else) but it goes against the principle of what we are trying to do with AideRSS. While it can be difficult to go from an “addiction” of 1000 posts a day to only 200 or 300 hundred for example. It can be quite liberating and hopefully you can do wonderful things with all the time you would have spent going through those 700 eliminated posts.
Worst case scenario you can always go back to the original site or source and read all the stories there if there are times that you have a lot of time to kill.
We also realize that our system may not be perfect and there may be the odd story cut out that you could have been interested in but one also likely missed some important posts trying to sift through so many stories before AideRSS as well.
Is there a way to do a batch edit of “My Feeds” or a global change?
This is a great idea and something that we are currently working on. We hope to have a couple of different batch edit or global change features (such as deleting multiple RSS feeds) completed and integrated into AideRSS in the near future.
These are some of the questions we have received so far. Please keep your ideas and questions coming and we’ll update our blog in a few days with more tips and responses in addition to following up with each inquiry personally. Thanks!