Flash Rss Reader

Another little flash gadget I just made... An RSS reader. Yes, I know it's an original idea - but it seemed like a good, comprehensible, and to some degree useful thing.

For fun I made iPhone style navigation - in the sense that you need to drag right or left to move between items.
It lists the blog feed from labs.episerver.com.

The trickiest thing was to handle all the security around loading a URL in flash. Flash can only load data from the same domain as it is located on (or another domain that has a crossdomain.xml file in the root, allowing flash access). Anyway, the simple solution was to make a small rss proxy in c# (around 3 lines of code) and put it on my test-domain together with the flash app.

Cool Service: FeedJumbler

I love RSS feeds (well and I don't exactly dislike Atom either). But one of the few annoying things about them is that as soon as you have more than 5-10 feeds that you follow daily you'll run into the problem that the feed-viewers will fill up all your available space on your Google start-page (or whatever portal you might be using).
Use a real RSS reader you might say..But I tried that - and it didn't work for me. I have enough applications open on an average day - no need to have one more. And to use Outlook as rss reader sucks, cause my Outlook is always open on the Inbox - not on the feeds.

So, just as I was about to create my own tool for merging several feeds into one I found FeedJumbler. This is a cool site that allows you to quickly setup a merged feed in whatever protocol you prefer.
To try it out I've made a merged feed of some of my regular favorites and put it in the right-hand pane.
If you want to see a list of the feeds (and to have the ability to add this merged feed to your start-page, see it here).

It just goes to proof that sometimes you don't need to invent everything yourself.