Freshly launched FeedNames takes in an RSS feed and generates a cloud of links to the various items.

Clicking on the icon in front of each name, brings up a list of articles from the blogosphere which have a reference to the item. Unfortunately nobody really links to us. I sit here all alone.

An interesting change in the widget space recently is the ability to ‘export’ widgets from the dashboard sites and drop into your blog. About a month ago the personalized dashboard service yourminis.com pushed out functionally for users to export their widgets (Flash based) and embed into their “online identities” including social site like myspace and Facebook, your blog or any other website.

To export a yourminis widget, mouse-over the widget and a “copy me” link should appear in the top-right corner.

Yesterday we used a yourminis.com widget to display a Yahoo!pipes mashup called YouTunes.

The other day Yahoo! released “pipes“. A drag and drop interface which allows you to combine several feeds into one, using results from the first to manipulate (filter, sort, count, etc.) results from the second (and so on).

Initial impressions of the user interface blew me away. At first I thought pipes was Flash based, but it’s all AJAX. Frick’n brilliant. The whole AJAX based drag/drag stretchy/shrinky connection points is a first for me.

That said, it does take some brain power to figure out how this machine works. At the moment there is little to no documentation, few tutorials and some of the fundamental functionality like filtering by Dates does not work (yet). The forums do seem pretty active with useful tips.

The service reminds me of database query generators.

With all this talk of generating custom feeds from data where no feed exists, and now piping them all into Yahoo! to perform data manipulation, things are getting exciting.

For instance, Nick Bradbury (HomeSite, TopStyle & FeedDemon) created a demonstration pipe which gets the iTunes Top 10 feed, pushes those results into a YouTube search, which returns an RSS feed of Videos for each Top 10 track. Très cool.

Now what? How about adding the new YouTunes feed to a yourminis.com YouTube video widget, plopping onto your blog and mashing up the place.

Adding the Criteo AutoRoll widget to your blog will display links to other blogs your readers should like. Kind of like how Google Adsense works, but displays links to relevant blogs instead of advertising. AutoRoll requires sign-up and simple size/color configuration.

Criteo gets my vote for simply being based in Paris, France. J’aime Paris.

User comments from our previous post
“Create an RSS feed from any website data” pointed out a couple other options.

1. openkapow. Download and install their RoboMaker software to create REST, RSS, ATOM or HTML service feeds from just about any source that has a URL.

openkapow almost lost me on step one “Download and Install RoboMaker” (No Mac version available), and then again after I noticed it was a 106 MB file (eek!), but I pushed through. After installing, my first impression is ‘complicated‘. openkapow seems incredibly powerful, but it’s going to take some work to go through the tutorials and learn your way up to making a REST service or even consuming a simple feed.

2. FeedYes. Point the service at a URL and it tries to figure out if there’s any structured data on the page. Seems to work well with my initial tests, but the user interface could use a bit of polishing.

Out of the four so far (Feed43, Dapper, openkapow, FeedYes) my vote for straight up easiest to use with some options is Dapper; completely web based, no problems with reliability and hopefully any of the UI awkwardness of the initial releases will improve with age.

Hope this helps.

Ever wanted to subscribe to a site via RSS but they don’t provide a feed?

Several services have sprung up lately to solve the problem. Feed43 and Dapper step you through a process of creating a custom feed for a feedless site. The configuration at both Feed43 and Dapper are more complicated than I would like but doable after some trial and error.

Not exactly widgets, although I find them incredible useful. They may give you something to fill up content for your RSS feed reader widgets like those provided by Widgetbox, SpringWidgets and MuseStorm.

I’ve been using both services to track forums which do not provide RSS feeds (not cool by the way). Also great for sites where you want to monitor search results.

Hope this helps.

Make a “blidgit”? I really hope that little chestnut does not catch on.

This Widgetbox widget is basically a Feed puller. I like the tool, the configuration and designer interfaces are first class, probably the best in the biz. Maybe I just have to sleep on that name. I’m sure it will look better in the morning.

Suck any RSS feed into this Flash based reader widget-y widget. Works well, looks good, easy to configure… but…why?

Let people keep up-to-date with what you’re doing, or create a widget for a site you frequently visit yourself.

Display any reddit feed in your site.