Service Saturday: Grazr

Feeds have changed the way we read information on the web today. I am subscribed to approximately 200 feeds, most of which I “read” every single day.

To read feeds, you usually need a feed reader. But what if you want to share the feeds you read with the world. What if you want to display it on your blog or website?

You would need some kind of script that would fetch the feed and display it. What if there are several feeds?

I like to keep the “dirty” work off my hands as much as possible and let somebody specialized do the job. In this case, Grazr is one such service.

Grazr is a free publishing tool for feeds. It lets you quickly and easily display RSS, RDF, Atom, and OPML files on any Web page so they can be viewed by any visitor to the site.
Grazr is written in Javascript, so no software download or installation is necessary for someone to view it in a browser. As long as Javascript is enabled, it can be used in any modern Web browser.

To set up Grazr, you need to Create a Widget by supplying a feed or OPML url. Grazr will then fetch the feed(s) and display it (them). You can then choose to either customize or leave it as is.

You have the option of several themes, as well as the width and the height of the widget.

The next step is to generate the code. Grazr supports this for several services like Blogger, WordPress, Netvibes, Pageflakes etc.

e.g. below is the widget I created for the feed of this blog.

While the process of creating a grazed feed is easy, what Grazr needs to implement is a way to add feeds to the currently existing widget. To explain, I was only able to create the widget with a single feed. I could have used a OPML file, but what if I wanted to use just two feeds?

There a great number of things that you can do with Grazr than just fetching ready made feeds. Using GrazrScript you can easily create custom forms, and use the entered data in any URL for a feed or an OPML file.

I haven’t ventured into this but it gives good power for someone interested. If you give it a shot, do comment below and let me know your experience.