Feedonomics

David Hunter, who runs the International Association of Bioethics blog, wanted a way to aggregate and organize the RSS feeds from major philosophy and bioethics academic journals. He found Grazr to be a great solution, with a little bit of tweaking.

Hunter was looking for something that would let him share his collection of RSS feeds with other academics. “I had set up a Netvibes page, which aggregated all the table of contents of the relevant journals in bioethics,” Hunter says, ”but there was no way to share it with others (who were quite keen to use it) without giving them access to my own personal page. I searched for RSS feed aggregators, tried a bunch of things that didn’t work well, and then found Grazr.” Hunter had tried using Pageflakes but “it was a major hassle to keep updated since it didn’t update from an OPML.”

Hunter really likes the ease of use factor with Grazr. “It’s fantastic, because it was easy when I started using it to just point it at an OPML file elsewhere and keep it updated automatically when I added more feeds. Of course now it is even easier since the files hosted at Grazr have become easy to modify.” Hunter says Grazr is also easy for users to figure out, “which is great when you are presenting something that is going to be used by a bunch of academics in philosophy, some of whom are fairly computer-phobic.”

He says the “trickiest” part of using Grazr was making it accessible from the front page, but keeping it from dominating the layout. “Eventually I figured out how to put one in a java box.” Visitors to the site need only click below “Motherlode of Philosophy Journal Tables of Content, News, Blogs and Resources,” to “pop-in” a Grazr widget in the sidebar.

Hunter would like to be able to add a feed to his Grazr right in his browser, he says, but in the meantime he recommends that others take advantage of the help files. “Almost everything I’ve done with the Grazr I figured out just by reading the help files and experimenting.” He thinks mailing list addicts could benefit from Grazr widgets. “Mailing lists are quite easily converted into RSS feeds, which can then be aggregated with a Grazr. This is really useful if you have several large mailing lists. This way you can quickly glance down the titles but only open the interesting ones, rather than having to wade through all the emails.”