Nifty Toolness

You might have noticed that there are two 'aggregated feed' doodads in the sidebar (over on the right, right down the bottom).

One of them has all the RSS feeds from ZeroHedge, TickerGuy, Mish's GlobalEconomicAnalysis… and a couple of other analytical sites.

I find it useful to aggregate all of these, so that I don't have to read each feed (or even their headlines) in an RSS Reader.

I use ThunderBird's built-in jobbie… and although I only load headlines, it annoyed me to have to go from ZHs feed (the first feed of the day, always) to TickerGuy's, to Mish's… and so on. I only wanted to load one RSS feed – a customised, composite feed that included all the others.

In times past, people who wanted to do that would have to write their own aggregator. I had done precisely that but it was a pain because Atom feeds had slightly different XML structures to, say, RSS2.0 feeds – my litle aggregator never worked perfectly and had to be tweaked anytime I wanted to add a new feed.

Yesterday I found an online service that does all the aggregation for you, and furnishes the composite feed… and as usual, it does so for free.

It's called XFruits -  which shows that the name of a thing says absolutely nothing about its utility.

If you're one of those people who uses RSS to read sites, then it's a sensational tool. Let's say that you load 4 different RSS feeds that give you Economics data… well, combine them into one.

And you maybe look at Gretchen Morgenson's RSS, and ZH, and TickerGuy for opinion… well, collate them.

And you look at a couple of different Economic Calendars… sticky-tape those bad boys together into one RSS and you will feel like you bought one of those things on teh.interwebs that promises to make your junk grow 4 inches in a week.

MarketMentat gets no kickbacks for mentioning XFruits, and I have no doubt that XFruits is not the only service of its type in the entire interwebs… but for your Beloved GT, it gets the nod.

In other news, RantTube now exists, but as yet its user management system is not integrated with the broader MarketMentat user base – I plan to remedy that tomorrow, and enable the whole box and dice on Wednesday.

Thereafter, registered users will be able to upload video (which will be automagically converted to FLV format) to shout their opinion from the rooftops.

I've long been an admirer of the video stylings of Stefan Molyneux (from FreeDomainRadio), but I think that the next step is content that actually goes the other way – that is, 'client-generated' video content… where anyone with a webcam can 'sound off' and give their response to whatever takes their fancy.

Now I would prefer that you don't upload videos of you playing with your own junk, unless it's on a private area of the site (the private area will exist, dont worry about that).