I've mentioned on a couple of occasions my desire to read RSS feeds tied to particular topics rather than particular people/blogs. The answer seems to be to subscribe to a feed of search results for that topic at a good RSS search tool. I've taken to subscribing to Feedster search results (which are available as an RSS feed) and using that to keep up on various topics that I'm intersted in ("mozilla," "mars," "astronomy," and "firebird," for example.)
I was lacking just two things to make this a really nice experience. First, I needed a clean and simple feed reader for Firebird. I'd tried NewsMonster which is just too big (and too featureful,) Aggreg8 which isn't quite finished enough and doesn't integrate well with Firebird, and ForumZilla which is also still in the very early stages. None of these really fit my minimal needs.
RSS Reader Panel to the rescue. It has a clean bookmark-based interface that integrates well into Firebird's sidebar, (it even has it's own toolbar button available in the customize palette) and uses the Firebird extension settings mechanism. It's just very sharp and very Firebird.
The second problem I have is that Feedster (unquestionably the best RSS search tool on the planet) only offers ten results in their search results RSS feed and this is insufficient for my needs where there are usually a few dozen new posts that match my search each time I run it. With the regular search I can specify up to 100 results per page but the RSS feed URL doesn't seem to accept the &limit=100 bit. Maybe the kind folks building this great tool will help me out :-)
