Analyze RSS Feed Content (with a Bookmarklet!)

This handy utility takes an RSS feed as input and provides a list of all the elements that are useful in your widgets. You can try it out here:

NewsGator Feed Analyzer

I made a bookmarklet for it, so you when you are viewing a feed in your browser you can just click a link to see the post content. This even works on regular websites: for instance, if you are visiting http://www.cnn.com, our system will be able to determine the RSS feed for that site and pull up the content. Go ahead an click on it to see what happens!

NewsGator Feed Analyzer Bookmarklet

In Firefox, just drag that link up to your toolbar. In IE, right-click on the link and add to favorites.

Why use it?
It's a far simpler way of viewing the content of a feed than looking through the XML for what can be used in a widget.

What does it all mean?
The analyzer lists the following for items in the feed.

• Title - The article title.
• Link - The HTML URL of the article.
• Pub Date - Date/time the article was published in the feed.
• Feed Name
• Guid - The unique identifier for the feed item. Usually just the HTML URL.
• Author
• Comments RSS - The URL of the comments feed for a post item.
• Enclosure Type - The enclosure's MIME type.
• Enclosure URL - The URL of the enclosure: here is one place where you'll see thumbnail and video content
• Media RSS - And this is the other place you will see podcast and video URLs, and occasionally thumbnails.

I like using the analyzer to see if items have thumbnails or video/audio content associated with them.