The Programmable Feed Reader

Adam DuVander, December 1st, 2011

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If you subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds, you may find yourself wanting to view only a subset of the content. You can organize by folder, but sometimes searching the feeds is the quickest way to get at what you seek. A new service from Q-Sensei is now bringing that feed search power to your applications via its Q-Sensei FeedBooster API.

The FeedBooster application gives you a basic feed reader, displaying stories in the boxy portal style made popular by NetVibes and PageFlakes in the Web 2.0 heyday. There is a somewhat buggy Google Reader import support, but have a look at its API documentation and you realize that’s not so important: you can add, remove and update subscriptions right from the API.

It’s the search where Q-Sensei is focusing its efforts. The API lets you query your feeds by a bunch of meta-data fields, including author, feed and date. Some of those fields, such as tags, are actually auto-generated by Q-Sensei’s “multi-dimensional search” and can be filtered alongside fulltext search.

There are 28 feed related APIs in our directory, including the Bloglines API, among the first ever added to ProgrammableWeb.