Reviews: digg.com RSS feeds

It’s hard to keep up with everything that is going online. Even with RSS web feeds, it is still impossible to subscribe to every cool site about web design. Things will be missed. However, what about if you use the power of digg.com to find things for you?

The estimated time to read this article is 2 minutes
Posted on: Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Digg.com

No doubt, you have already heard of digg.com. If you haven’t, digg is a community news site that allows members to post technology stories they have read elsewhere on the web.

Not many people know this

What you might not know is that when you search on the site you can save that search as an RSS feed. For example if you search on the phrase "web design" and subscribe to the associated RSS feed you will be undated every time a new story mentioning the words "web design" is added.

The limitations

Okay, so you knew that too! Clever bastard. Then no doubt, you are aware of the limitations of this service. Somebody might post a story on accessibility or AJAX and you wouldn’t pick up on it because it didn’t have the phase "web design" in it. What is more, at the moment you cannot search on multiple phrases at once.

The solution

However, there is a work around to this. Instead of adding each search individually to your news reader (which can get messy) you can use the RSS mix service to "splice" these various feeds together so giving you a single feed for all your chosen search phases.

The example

Here is one I prepared earlier (my Blue Peter reference of the day). This feed will return all digg.com stories that contain any of the following phases:

  • Web design
  • Web 2.0
  • Web standards
  • Usability
  • Accessibility

Subscribe to my web design digg feed

Check out RSS Mix

Check out digg

In the trade these are known as calls to action. Feel free to take your pick!