Yesterday, Webware (a CNET site) wrote a nice post on RSS Mixer: “RSS Mixer stacks up feeds.” They particularly liked the Apple Dashboard widget feature and the iPhone formated pages. They even built and embedded a Web widget in the article’s page. RSS Mixer also received mention in Widgets Lab. It’s been nice to see RSS Mixer get so much attention even in its fledgling prototype state.

The post mentions (as others have pointed out) that there is no way edit or manage user-created feeds, nor is there a search function. Thankfully, the author seems to understand that this is just a prototype. Over the last two weeks, we’ve been thinking about new features for this site, including searching and editing. If you have any suggestions, please send them our way. We’ll let you know what the next steps for the prototype are once we’ve decided.

Update (August 1, 2007): A couple of new reviews worth mentioning, one in WebInventif (France) and another in Abril.com (Brazil).

Our latest prototype, RSS Mixer, is now available. This is by far the most elaborate of the prototypes we’ve been working on over the last few months. All of these experimental applications are part of a larger project that we are developing for release in 2008.

RSS Mixer allows you to combine various feeds into a new one that can be viewed as RSS, HTML, an iPhone page, as well as a Web and Apple Dashboard Widget.

The design is simple: you can create a title for your custom RSS mix and you can add up to ten feeds in the form. A listing of recent mixes, along with a few featured ones, is also included. This prototype (and the others) was programmed using Ruby on Rails.

Each custom mix includes Widgets, an iPhone formatted version, and links to the various feeds in the mix. Below are some links to a custom mix called Environmental News.

Take a look at the site and let us know what you think.

A few weeks back I wrote about a Web page capture utility that we developed as a prototype. We’ve just a built another application that takes things a bit further. Along with a screen shot, this new prototype pulls metadata and other information from your blog. If available, it can pull back the blog title, feed, type of software, author, description, and the date of the most recent feed. In addition, the Technorati Rank (via the Technorati API) and number of Yahoo! Inlinks are displayed (we used the Yahoo! Site Explorer API).

Like its predecessor this experimental application was developed in Ruby on Rails with a bit C programming. Let us how it works for you.

Try the Blog Analyzer Protype v.01

(Update August 6, 2007: We’ve taken the blog analyzer prototype down permanently. The RSS Mixer prototype is still available and there are no plans to take it down.)

For an upcoming project, we’re developing an application that automatically takes a snapshot of a Web page and produces a variety of thumbnail-sized images. This application was developed using Firefox on Linux along with some C programming and a little bit of Ruby on Rails development. Please try out this prototype: grab any site you like. Let us know how it works.

Try the Site Screen Shot v.01

(Update August 6, 2007: We’ve taken web page image capture prototype down permanently. The RSS Mixer prototype is still available and there are no plans to take it down.)