This is one of those tools that I found so damn funky & useful at times, I just had to share it with everyone....
Keep in mind that RSS is relatively new tech. - as a result, many feeds aren't exactly formatted as they should be, and getting the feed host to change their feed is usually next to impossible.
From this need, spawns a new tool from Yahoo - Pipes.
Pipes allows you to supply an XML/RSS feed, then apply a whole arsenal of filters and operators on it, then render the result at a new feed address.
This becomes very handy if you have a feed like the one produced by the MTA team for their dev blog. They have configured the topic as "RSS Feed" with no subtitle. When you integrate this feed in an aggregator, the title shows up top as "RSS feed", where all the others have meaningful names & descriptive subtitles. At first you may tolerate this, but over time, you start to worry that people might think the misconfiguration is on your server, thus, it makes you look bad.
By using Yahoo pipes, I have been able to format the MTA:SA Blog feed with a title of my choosing, a subtitle, then use this newly generated feed live in my own projects... in this case, the lastRSS aggregator on our forums towards the bottom of the main board index.
Try messing about with it - you can use it to produce a single feed that includes news items from several feeds, too.. which is great if you want a simple RSS block even in your igoogle tabs... what?! you say you don't have any of those?? Get with the times mo... the web is dynamic now & full of little goodies that update live.. igoogle is a great place to house them all.
http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en <-- set up a logon & replace your google home page with a funkier version.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/ news feeds are a great way to save you surfing 100 sites to stay up to date with all ya favourite tech. info - just keep an eye on all the headlines... and with this tool, you can merge several feeds into one.
Thanks go out to my wonderful designer girlfriend, Zen, who suggested this one.