Product Reviews

News feed publishing is one of the fastest-growing areas of the Internet. The ability to browse the headlines on several of your favourite websites quickly, and navigate to only the ones whose updated content interests you is an efficient way of getting your daily/hourly news fix. Likewise, the ability to display headlines and snippets from your site to surfers who may otherwise rarely visit makes this form of publishing very popular among bloggers, news sites and, increasingly, marketeers.

Until now, creating a news feed for your site on a Mac has been a frustrating affair. Unless you use a content management system such as Moveable Type, or use one of the ready-made blogging systems, you've been limited to creating an XML file by hand or using one of a very small number of dedicated feed-creation tools. These are generally lacking in useful features and are often buggy, but Feeder from Reinvented Software aims to change all that.

Feeder is an RSS 2-compliant feed-creation tool that offers pretty much all the features you could ask for, including support for Podcasting (where feeds are

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published as audio files that can be downloaded and transferred to your iPod). It's well-designed, easy to use and looks great.

When you launch Feeder for the first time, you're presented with the option to import an existing feed from an XML file, download a live feed in order to edit it, or create a new feed from scratch. The downloading and importing of feeds both worked very well; the screen grab shows a feed downloaded from MacUser's website.

Creating a new feed from scratch was just as easy. Selecting New Feed from Feeder's tool bar calls up a dialog that invites you to enter details about the feed, including its name, a URL for the website on which it will be hosted, and the feed's filename. These details can be amended and added to at any time using a drawer that slides out from Feeder's main interface. This drawer also allows you to decide whether you want the time and date of an entry set automatically or manually and to enter details for uploading your feed, such as the FTP address and login details.

Creating a new item is very straightforward and is made easier by the inclusion of a drop-down menu of basic HTML tags, as well as buttons for creating links and adding images. The feed Preview displays a beautifully formatted version of your item.

Feeds can be validated by means of a menu command in Feeder, and if you want to upload the feed via FTP, you can do that using the Publish button on Feeder's toolbar. Alternatively, the feed can be saved as an XML file and uploaded manually.

If you've been looking for a way to create and edit RSS feeds for your website, Feeder is an excellent tool. Better still, at $24.95, it's very well priced.