Inelegant

Syndication feeds (RSS/Atom) can be used to follow your favourite blogs and news sites. Here are 42 other uses for feeds:

1. Monitoring activity in your Subversion repository with SubveRSSed and svnlog.xslt.
2. Tracking changes to open source projects. Sourceforge provides RSS feeds for all of its projects. If you want to track a project hosted elsewhere you can use cvshistoryscraper.py or svnlogscraper.py, Python scripts from Leslie M. Orchard’s Hacking RSS and Atom book.
3. Reading your e-mail. MailBucket and DodgeIt produce a feed of e-mails you forward them. Gmail users can view a feed of their inbox using https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom.
4. Recording Instant Messenger messages. Sabifoo lets you I.M with a bot and posts your messages in a personalised feed.
5. Tracking packages with Package Alert and Simple Tracking.
6. Monitoring the status of your Web host. Many hosts provide notifications of problems with their service via feeds. For instance, Dreamhost, Pair, Site5, and TextDrive.
7. Automatically downloading new episodes of TV series via BitTorrent. RSS + Bittorrent + Xbmc == Bliss, How to Subscribe to TV Shows Using The Democracy Player, Bittorrent, and RSS.
8. Keeping a To-Do list with TaDa List and Remember the Milk.
9. Syndicating a site without a feed with RSSPect and PonyFish.
10. Reading your feeds via e-mail with RSS Fwd.
11. Being notified of events with Eventful and Upcoming.
12. Temporarily bookmarking URLs with List Mixer.
13. Creating “serialised” feeds for content which needs to be consumed in a certain order. Feed Cycle.
14. Converting feeds to JavaScript so they can be embedded in a Web page. Feed2JS.
15. Filtering/merging/splicing feeds. Feed Shake.
16. Tracking ticker symbols. Yahoo Finance provides such feeds, e.g. GOOG.
17. Converting a feed to a HTML page with RSS2HTML.
18. Monitoring price changes on Amazon with RSS Talker.
19. Receiving predictions for airfare prices with FareCast.
20. Receiving notifications when pages change with NoticeThat and Montastic.
21. Reading feeds via your I.M client. Rasasa and Immedi.at provide a Web interface, and im_subs.py lets you DIY.
22. Monitoring server logs. RSS Pipe creates a feed of the output from an arbitrary command. Logs can be monitored by combining this with tail.
23. Tracking your AdSense earnings with a PHP script.
24. Getting quotes of the day and words of the day.
25. Viewing TV listings with ktyp’s RSS TV Listings.
26. Tracking shopping deals and offers with Slick Deals, More Stuff for Less, and Ben’s Bargains.
27. Managing your calendar with RSS Calendar, LoCalendar, and Google Calendar.
28. Logging referring links with Reeferss.
29. Monitoring Ebay auctions with Feedbay and RSS Auction.
30. Keeping notes with Web Note.
31. Converting feeds to PDF with RSS2PDF.
32. Reading feeds via SMS with RSS2SMS.
33. Finding new ebooks with PDFCHM.com.
34. Finding new torrents with Mininova, The Pirate Bay, and Demonoid, all of which provides feeds for each category.
35. Receiving weather forecasts with RSS Weather.
36. Tracking edits to Wikipedia pages by subscribing to the RSS page on article history pages, e.g. Leonardo da Vinci.
37. Getting personalised music recommendations with EarFeeder.
38. Monitoring currency exchange rates with Currency Source.
39. Reminders of your future events with Future Email.
40. Tracking ‘TODO:’ reminders in a code base with Code Todo Lines to RSS.
41. Sharing your bookmarks (and subscribe to others’) with del.icio.us, Blink List, Ma.gnolia, and Furl.
42. Track who you owe money to with I Owe You.

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