Feed Control is a new, hosted service we’re offering here at FiveFilters.org. It can monitor different types of feeds: RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, and webpages. For each feed you can set up filtering, email alerts and webhooks, as well as RSS and JSON generation.
For regular RSS and webpage-to-RSS feeds, you can also enable feed expansion to include the full article content.
Filtering
Set up filters to only include items of interest, e.g. ignore a tweet unless it mentions ‘covid’, or alternatively, ignore tweets that do mention ‘covid’. You can filter on the item URL too, e.g. ignoring items unless they contain the segment ‘/news/’ in the URL.
When monitoring a Twitter account, it’s also possible to include or exclude retweets.
Email alerts
Enable alerts to be notified by email when new items are detected. Email alerts can also be sent daily, weekly, or monthly, if the feed being monitored produces too many alerts.
Webhooks
Webhooks are intended for developers. Feed Control can send your application item data for each new item. Receive the original HTML; a stripped-down, sanitized version; and plain text.
It’s a great alternative to monitoring feeds in your application, and also a nice solution for serverless setups. Read more about webhooks in our documentation, including basic code examples.
Feed expansion
Transform truncated feeds (those that do not contain the full article content) into full-text feeds by having the article content pulled in for each item.
RSS and JSON generation
After configuring your feed, you can then enable RSS and JSON generation. This allows you to subscribe to your feed in your favourite news reader, or pull in the JSON file in your application. It’s also possible to use the RSS output to integrate further via services like Zapier and IFTTT.
Try it free
You can try Feed Control with a free, 7-day trial give you access to all its features. Get started here.
Please let us know if you have any trouble.
Upcoming changes to the Full-Text RSS free service
With Feed Control now available, we’re going to be limiting the free Full-Text RSS service we provide. These changes do not affect users of the premium, hosted service (users with an access key).
What to expect?
- If you use a news reader and a feed generated by our free service – feed beginning with
ftr.fivefilters.org/makefulltextfeed.php– you will soon start seeing a notice at the end of your feed items pointing you to this blog post and suggesting you switch to Feed Control with feed expansion instead. - You might notice less frequent updates as we start rate limiting the free service. This might not affect you at all or as much if you run your news reader on your own computer, but if you use a hosted, cloud-based service, you might notice fewer updates to your feeds.
- When creating new feeds via the free service, we’ll show you Feed Control as an option.
Why are we doing this?
Managing the free service has simply become more and more of a burden over time. We have never required account signups for using the service, as such, it’s been hard to control usage, leading to excessive strain on our servers.
What are your options?
Users of the free Full-Text RSS service have a few options:
- If Feed Control offers what you need, you can signup for an account and move your feeds over.
- You can signup for our premium Full-Text RSS hosted plan where you’ll receive an access key to our premium service.
- You can buy the self-hosted version of Full-Text RSS to host it yourself.
- If your only use is via your own code (and you don’t need a publicly accessible feed URL), our hosted API is also available.