Publi.sh Your RSS Feeds For Free

In the comments section of an RSS Roundup post on Brian Clark's CopyBlogger, Charles points out a new site called Publi.sh. Publi.sh lets you create an RSS feed and hosts it for you free of charge.

Now, despite being an RSS evangelist, my hubsite doesn't have a web feed, primarily because new content comes along infrequently so far. I thought I'd try Publi.sh to set up a feed for the site.

The sign-up process is very easy, and you get your own (cryptic) URL. You can use the management panel to post a new item, or you can use a free email address that they give you to email in an item. The feed will only show your last 15 items.

The window that pops up for posting new items looks vaguely like that you might see with a web-based email service. It includes a WYSIWYG editor for you to type in a summary.

The process of adding an item is very simple, as is deleting or editing existing feed items. I only have three complaints about this very easy to use, free service:

The URLs are cryptic. They don't need to be. This is a minor issue, though.
It's not very hard for a subscriber to stumble onto the free email address you'd use for adding items by email. Well, part of the address anyway. I won't reveal details here, however. And you still need the other part of the address. Hint: use a strong password string for your login account.
You can create multiple web feeds, but you need to create a new Publi.sh account for each feed. This is an unfortunate nuisance.

This service is a nice free option for anyone who is not publishing a weblog and thus does not have a web feed generated automatically. It's also suitable for creating alternate or aggregate feeds. For example, if you already have several websites, each with their own feed, you can create a new Publi.sh feed combining them.

On the other hand, they're no Feedburner. But if they added an API, a way track subscribers, icons to post on your website, ways to promote you feeds, and so on, they'd be one up on Feedburner, who require you to have your own feed to start with.

>> Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Technorati Tags: rsscases, rss cases, publi.sh, web feed creators

Raj,

Great overview of Publi.sh thanks, and I take on board your feedback.

A few thoughts/responses...

1) URLs are purposefuly cryptic. I thought that many users would use Publi.sh as reminder feeds (using future posting dates) so might not want others to stumble on their feed url. The urls make this unlikely and I figured that as long as the browser friendly feed pages made it easy to subscribe then the url itself wouldn't matter.

2) I agree the email posting security isn't military grade, but I figure that it suffices for a free service that isn't likely to be used for anything that needs super security, and so isn't likely to provide much incentive to anyone to try. Having said that I also assume that users are savvy enough to create good passwords, and if they do this then it should be pretty secure.

3) Yep, you're right Publi.sh is no FeedBurner, but then it isn't meant to be...it's just a way to build a feed for free so I kept it purposefully simple. Of course your Publi.sh feed can be fed into FeedBurner if you want to get all that fancy tracking stuff (and it is fancy...I love FeedBurner).

4) I have been pleased to see a few people picking up Publi.sh as a way to automatically convert their mailing list into a feed...just subscribe your provided Publi.sh email address to your mailing list and then whenever your send out an email to the list it will automatically get posted to your Publi.sh feed (which itself could be fed through FeedBurner for subscriber tracking!)

Anyway, thanks again. I am totally open to ideas on how to improve...

Posted by: Charles at March 29, 2006 12:56 PM

Charles,

Thanks for the feedback.

I think that you have the nugget of a great idea. Now you need some wrappers around the nugget. That is, features. All in good time, I suppose.

I never thought about that: pipe your Publi.sh feed in via Feedburner. (Despite using Feedburner myself, I have a disconnect in my head when it comes to writing about it.)

Keep up the good work.

Posted by: raj at March 30, 2006 12:06 AM