A soupy twist
Giles Turnbull
More precisely: http://www.soup.io
It's a cross between Tumblr and Feedburner and one or two other things
that I can't put my finger on right now. You tell it where to find
your stuff elsewhere on the 'tubes, and it pulls it all in and scrubs
it all up and sticks it on an attractive web page for you. Very
quickly and easily, too.
Things I like about soup.io:
- you can pronounce it "Soupio!" if you like. You know, like "Scorchio!"
- the sign-up process. In short, you get to try before you buy. Throw
some incoming feeds at it, make some test posts, meddle with the
templates until you get something you like the look of - *then* you
can sign up (which is dirt-simple and instantaneous) and the thing
you've just created is *yours*, immediately. It's very satisfying
- it's *Austrian*. You don't see many cool Austrian webapps, do you?
- rather like Aaron's wiki service at Jottit (http://jottit.com), new
features are introduced as you go along. So you don't have to take it
all in at the start; you can begin with the simple basics and work
your way up to more complicated extras as and when the mood takes you.
The interface is designed to flow from the one to the other, letting
you discover things as you go. The more experienced you are as a web
user, the faster you'll make your way to the advanced stuff. But that
still means the less-experienced get a *good* experience of Soup.io.
- it makes it trivially simple to combine many RSS feeds into one.
Feedburner, to my astonishment, doesn't let you do this (I could have
sworn that it *used to*); Yahoo Pipes does, but not everyone wants to
mess around with Pipes.
I probably needn't bother telling you that I've made a soupy stream of
my own, and that it is at http://gilest.soup.io.
Soupy success all round, I say. I shall be writing an article about
this very shortly.