Update 06/11: PostRank appears to still work, but they have been bought by Google (not a big surprise…). We are waiting to see if the Social First top-down strategy that Page is implementing will cause PostRank to atrophy or shut down anytime soon. There is a Chrome/Safari plugin that works with Google Reader, too.

Update: FeedHub is dead. It’s been deceased for almost a year now. Their parent company mSpoke shut the free news feed authority weighing system. I have replaced FeedHub with another free feed weighing service, PostRank. It’s not as convenient to use. All your feeds are not combined into one feed. If you have over one hundred feeds that you subscribe to, you will want to export an OPML file (collection of feed URLs) and import that file into your feed reader. You do however have the option within each feed to allow either all, good, great, or only the best ranked news feed articles.

Original Article: Whether you believe that micro-blogging and syndication feeds provide too much information and makes us either dumber or smarter, information overload has been here for a while. Even though, Microsoft Internet Explorer has had an RSS button for two versions, I would say that syndication feeds are still not mainstream, yet highly valuable that you can feast on such a cornucopia of information without browsing to a single web page. Think of syndication as requested email (in juxtaposition to the majority of your Inbox, right?). If you are in the anal-retentive 43 folders crowd, you’ve probably already have a syndication feed management process in place for two years. If you haven’t and the thought of having to browse through 100 new blog posts every day is overwhelming, I recommend FeedHub.

I use FeedHub to provide me with the “most popular” blog posts from over 80 sources. As a web designer, I have a plethora of blogs to choose from. Some recommend if you don’t regularly get to read your feeds you have too many in your feed reader that you should declare RSS bankruptcy (similar to email bankruptcy). Another option is to create categories so that one category is for your “read all posts from these providers” and some is your “if I have time, read these posts.” I do not prefer this latter method, since I like a well-rounded mix of graphic design, programming (mostly front-end, but a little back-end), social media, blogging, and user interface posts. It is difficult to draw upon raw feeds to receive a variety of information. Some websites can be quite prolific. Do you really want to browse the headlines of all 23 posts from Mashable yesterday?  Probably not, unless you are one of the thousands of social media experts on Twitter.

What’s most popular?

I mentioned above that FeedHub only provides the “most popular” blog posts. I don’t have the exact details–that would be similar to figuring out Google’s PageRank, but I know that you can set preferences for certain blog tags over others in order to customize your reading. You can also set that you want the articles with the most comments or links to them. It’s all part of a machine they call mSpoke.

I like the idea. Where do I start?

You can import an OPML of my “daily feeds” (Right Click/Save As…) into FeedHub, if you think we would have similar tastes. My original list of blogs to read came from a computer science department of a university that I’ve now forgotten, and I’ve slowly added graphic design and social media oriented blogs. You can find a sample of my daily feed reads at the bottom of the Interactive Llama sidebar.

Going forward

For most of us, how connected we are is a lifestyle decision. You can always unplug to hike through the Canadian Rockies or to spend time with your children, unless your job mandates you reply to be “on call” and reply within five minutes. If you are in a creative, forward-thinking job (like a web designer at an agency) then, I highly recommend this hybrid of reading RSS feeds–but not too many, so that you are not overwhelmed, but do stay informed.

Amazon WishList to RSS feed

To create my WordPress Reading List and my Twitter Reading List, I start with an Amazon Wishlist. Why? Because I (and probably you) read the largest list of book reviews, before you either buy the book or go to pick it up from the library. So now using my Amazon Wishlist to RSS Pipe you have an RSS feed of your Reading list.

RSS feed to Twitter tweet

At first, I was dismayed when I heard about TwitterFeed.  My gut reaction was: What idiot would place a bot within their feed? The whole point of Twitter is to have one on one personal interaction with actual people. Recently, I’ve been moving away from that view. Bots are helpful if not over-used. I update my book reading list: Stephen M James: Books (Planning or have read) just a few times a month. Not enough to make my followers annoyed. After all, reading books is a part of my online persona that I’d like to share. In order implement your own Twitter Reading List:

1. Visit Yahoo! Pipes and clone Amazon Wishlist to RSS Pipe and enter your settings into it.
2. Publish your pipe and copy the URL of the RSS feed.
3. Log into TwitterFeed (you will have to share your Twitter credentials with TwitterFeed) and create a TwitterFeed from your Pipe RSS
4. Add your book reading list into an Amazon wishlist.

For your TwitterFeed prefix I recommend “Will read #book soon: ” so that your tweet will end up in the hash tag twitter search for #book. You have a maximum of 20 characters for the prefix, so make it worth it. Twitterfeed will shorten the name of the book and add a tinyURL to the end that links to the Amazon page (hopefully with your affiliate tag–although you are more than welcome to use mine!) You might be interested in my post, Create a reading list in WordPress from Amazon Wish List using Yahoo! Pipes, It’s about using pipes to create an RSS from an Amazon Wishlist and pulling your reading list into WordPress.

If you follow me on Twitter, you noticed that I recently bought a home and that I was confused about the date of BlogIndiana. I’m happy to say that our move-in date and the blog conference are on separate weekends, so now you don’t have to help me move (you were planning on it right?). You can go to BlogIndiana at the IUPUI Campus Center on August 16th and 17th.

Either way, I want to share my latest reading endeavors across my blogs. But how?

Originally I used Roblog’s WordPress Plugin, Now Reading, It’s truly a great plug-in. You can search Amazon for your book and grab the information. It has Now Reading, Have Read and Planned Reading sections. You can rate your books and write reviews. I discovered early on that I was not interested in writing reviews of the books. The other drawback was that it was locked into one blog. I placed it my Cultured Media blog where I list the podcasts and media that I listen to. I wanted to place my current reading in the sidebar or the footer of all my blogs–and why stop there? Why not Facebook, too? The other problem is that I didn’t want to search for the name of the book on Amazon, then log into my blog and paste the name into Now Reading to add it.

Portable list of information that can be subscribed to from multiple locations? Sounds like RSS feeds to me. I found an Amazon Wish List import for Yahoo! Pipes. It did an XML look-up on any public wish list and then published the information you wanted. I cloned it to my Pipes page, and soon found out it was an old version of Amazon Web Services. After a few hours spent parsing, the new version 4 web services offering from Amazon, I was good to go.

The limitation of my Amazon-Yahoo! Pipes RSS lookup is that you can only grab one page of items at a time. This isn’t a problem for my use. I didn’t want more than 10 items anyway.

Once, you have your pipes set up, then use FeedList to display your RSS feed from Yahoo! Pipes. An example of this is at the bottom of my blog. When I want to update my reading list, I add an item to my Amazon Wish List. And there’s nothing to limit this process to books. Whatever you add your Amazon Wish List will show up in the feed–not only books.

Edit One
This edit comments out all the SideBlog plug-in’s output except for the permalink and the content. You will find this code within SideBlog 5.1 at about line 170 within the function, sideblog($asidecategory=”).

// smjdesign BEGIN edit
$replacements[] = $sideblog_content->post_title;
// $replacements[] = wpautop($sideblog_content->post_content);
// $replacements[] = "<a href=\"" . $permalink . "\">#</a>";
$replacements[] = "<a href=\"" . $permalink . "\">"
.format_if_content_contains_link($sideblog_content->post_content);
// $replacements[] = "<a href=\"" . $permalink . "\" title=\""
.$sideblog_content->post_title . "\">"
.$sideblog_content->post_title . "</a>";
// $replacements[] = $sideblog_content->post_date;
// $replacements[] = "<a href=\"" . $permalink . "\">"
.$sideblog_content->post_date . "</a>";
// $replacements[] = $excerpt;
// $replacements[] = $excerpt2;
// smjdesign END edit

Edit Two:
Place the function, format_if_content_contains_link(), within sideblog.php. I have placed around line 200 after function, sideblog(). This function tests to see if the post content contains a link. There are better (non Regular Expression) ways to do this with PHP5. This function is needed to make content that contain links valid HTML (or XHTML). If not used, links tags will encapsulate other links tags.

// smjdesign BEGIN edit
function format_if_content_contains_link($content) {
	if( substr($content, strlen($content)-4 , 4) == "</a>" ) {
		$content_arr = split("<a href",$content);
		$content = preg_replace( "/<a href/", "</a><a href", $content, 1);
	}
	else {
		$content .= "</a>";
	}
	return ($content);
}
// smjdesign END edit

You can view the output of these changes in the sidebar at my personal site, Rachel and Stephen.

How to keep SideBlog posts within your post query

I noticed that quite a few people are discovering this page by wanting to NOT exclude “SideBlog categories” from the general post query (i.e.- from index.php). To do that, you will want to remove/comment out the filter:

add_filter('pre_get_posts','sideblog_post_filter');