Productivity Portfolio

RssFwd is straightforward and elegant. The beauty lies in the fact that the content is delivered to an application you already know your email program. This makes it particularly valuable to people who have PDAs or smart phones without web access. Since the RSS items appear in your inbox, you can process them as normal. You can assign priorities, rules, filters, color-coding or whatever functionality your email program supports. And yes, this means you can even forward items to co-workers and friends.

The service is designed to check every two hours or so to see if content has been added to your feeds. If so, you'll get the content of the feed item as an email. The Subject: displays as the article title and the Sender as the feed's name. The actual email address will show the domain yanime.org if you need to add it to your whitelist. This structure makes it easy if you wish to write rules to move items to a specific folder.

The hardest part of the set up process may be finding the URL of the RSS feed. As we've mentioned before, spotting feed links can be problematic as webmasters use varying buttons and methods to indicate a RSS feed is available. Some browsers such as Firefox and Maxthon alert you to RSS feeds if the webmaster has added specific coding.

To add a RSS feed to RssFwd.

1. Go to the site that has a RSS feed.

2. Look for the RSS link

3. Right-click the link and select Copy Link Location or Copy shortcut

4. Go to www.rssfwd.com/rssfwd#previewform

5. Paste your RSS link into the Url: text box

6. Click the Preview button

7. Review the output.

8. If it looks OK, click the link go to the bottom of this page

9. Enter your email address

10. Click Subscribe

There is another way that you can add a RSS feed and this is through the interactive feed display. The list displays feeds in alphabetical order, but with an interesting twist. The size of the type provides a rough estimate of the feed's popularity.

Although this listing doesn't include all feeds, it is a rather easy way to start the process. When you click on a feed name, you will see its preview and can then subscribe. OK, if you're really pressed for time, I added a button under the WEB MONITORS & RSS section on the right side of our site that allows you to preview our feed and subscribe.

Regardless of your level of expertise with RSS, we would encourage you to try this service. Even though we have multiple RSS readers, we find there are some feeds, which based on content or update frequency work very well with email. As an example, I have friend who is in Munich on assignment and maintains a diary. While I could add his feed into FeedDemon, it seems more personal to get it as an email. I'm sure if you play around with this service, you will also find many similar examples.