RSS
 

RSS 2 Gif

12 Oct 2006

Now here’s a cunning idea to promote your favorite RSS feed. RSS-2-Gif creates an image of your post titles and lets you decide how many you want to have on display. I suggest 5 topics is a normal average, because clicking on the image takes people to your site, not to the post itself. The image updates itself every time it is loaded and makes sure people see the latest items you’ve blogged. If you put this in the footer of your e-mails, you’ll be promoting your own blog (or the one from someone you like) and drive more traffic to your site.

It looks like this:



RSS2GIF

Get your own on RSS-2-Gif

Weird thing is: if you want to right-click and save the generated image, it says it’s a .png file. Hmm. That doesn’t match with the concept, but let’s not start nagging about that.

You can edit the generated HTML code and cut out the promotional image for RSS-2-Gif, but to be nice, I’ll add their button here anyway. What you see below is normally added in the middle under the light blue image that displays your feed items. I think they should work on a more sophisticated way to promote theirselves because the button isn’t really fitting in right with the rest of the project. If I’m going to use this in my e-mail footer, it’s going to be without the button. I mean, they already have the text in the generated image of my feed items, no?

 
5 Comments

Posted by Miel Van Opstal in Blogging, Blogs, Tools

 

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  1. Dean

    October 12, 2006 at 11:03 pm

    It’s a cool idea, but I don’t like the ellipsis after every title. Suppose you had a post called “Check this out…” – this tool would display “Check this out……”. Pretty silly. I agree with your idea about the linkback button – they need a better way to impliment that. Different fonts would be nice as well.

     
  2. Coolz0r

    October 13, 2006 at 12:03 am

    I totally agree with you there, Dean. The service is still in Beta though, and they’re open to any suggestions you might have. I’ll report this to them, and ask them if there is a way to customize it some more. Thanks for the feedback.

    Update, 1 minute later: damn, their contact link goes to a travel site. Looks spammy. Hmmm.

     
  3. morph

    October 14, 2006 at 5:22 am

    Hello there. you might wanna try RSS-to-JavaScript. I use it on my blog and it works fine.

    By the way, you can now add your own feeds to a site called mobifeeds.net and read them all on your cellphone through WAP/GPRS. Any kind of feed. News or blogs…

    And it wont even need any signing up. :)

     
  4. John

    October 17, 2006 at 2:52 pm

    Hi there!
    we read your article about our project and also make the travel page. The contact form is broken. Thanks for this information. We will take it back. Color change will be added in next days. Also the option to disable the … behind the headlines. Link to each headline’s page would be diffcult because it’s one image that is created.

    Thanks for your help.

    John

     
  5. Coolz0r

    October 17, 2006 at 4:35 pm

    John, thanks a lot for your input! it’s great to see someone is listening on the other end! Good luck with the service, and please keep me posted about updates or new things you launch.