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Easy RSS for All with FeedForAll

Troy Dreier

8/26/2005

While the early adopters have been using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to distribute regularly updated content for a long time now, many business users are just warming up to how useful RSS can be. While best known for its uses in blogging and podcasting, RSS is an easy and effective way to distribute any content. You won't need to worry about your message getting blocked by an e-mail spam filter with RSS, and it only goes to people who subscribe to the feed, so you won't be bothering people with unwanted posts.

While RSS was designed to be simple, it can seem hopelessly complex to new users who have no idea what an RSS feed even is. That's why NotePage, Inc., a small communications software company based near Boston, has come up with FeedForAll (www.feedforall.com), a beautifully simple program that makes creating and editing RSS feeds a breeze.

If FeedForAll feels especially easy to use and understand, perhaps that's because it grew out of an actual need at NotePage, Inc. One of the employees was having a hard time constructing RSS feeds to send out newsletters, so the marketing department suggested to the programmers that there might be a need for a tool that automates the process. The resulting tool has a simple interface that should keep anyone from getting lost.

Three tabs along the top of FeedForAll bring you to the three main areas: Feeds, Items, and Images. Feeds is the list of all of the RSS feeds that you've created; you can create a new one or add to an existing one. Items is the list of all the contents of your chosen feed. You add new content to a feed by adding a new item; users subscribe to your feed with an RSS reader, which then automatically downloads the new content. The Images tab is where you go to add an image that will display along with your feed. It's not necessary, but it makes a feed look more professional. FeedForAll contains simple photo editing controls, so you can rotate or re-size images within the program.

If even that sounds complicated, don't worry: FeedForAll has a wizard that walks you through the entire process. You'll find that adding items to the enclosure field, which lets you send such things as PDF documents or audio files with your feed, is easy to do. When you're finished, a built-in FTP program will upload the feed to your server.

At the moment, the 1.0 version of FeedForAll for Windows is slightly behind the Mac version in features, but that will change when the beta of the next version is released in late August. It will bring such features as Apple iTunes support, secure FTP, and automatic audio file FTPing to Windows users.

A single copy license of FeedForAll sells for only $39.95 (or $49.95, for the CD version). If you'd like to try it out, the company offers a 30-day demo on the site. Volume discounts are also available. Order 10 to 49 copies and they'll cost $34,95 each, while over 50 copies will cost $29.95 each. A full site license is $1,995 and a multi-site enterprise license is $2,495.

The Items tab in FeedForAll makes it easy to add new content to your RSS feed.

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