Want to have power over your own news content? Well then welcome to the Filtrbox RSS feed. As a Filtrbox member (its a FREE account), you have the ability to create your own RSS feeds and manage how the content is filtered. What does this mean for developers? This will give you the ability to set up a feed for say “Adobe AIR”, and use Filtrbox to manage the content. Managing the content allows you to choose how many articles are displayed, amount of history in days, and the quality ranking of the article. Once  you have setup a feed, it then becomes as easy as consuming it. Most mashups consist of maps, graphing or basic interactions between multiple components that share relevancy with one another. With the ability to manage your own content sources, you become in control of your application and will not have to rely on restriction based upon the source. Dealing with restriction like the integration of Yahoo maps before the AS3 api, was troublesome and limited in its context.

When using the Filtrbox RSS, you have two options, either consume the RSS as is, or if you are passing the feed through flash embed variables, you will have to base 64 Decode the content. Using the feed in Flex is as easy as an HTTPService request. Here is an example of a Base 64 decoder to use:

import mx.utils.Base64Decoder;
var decoder:Base64Decoder = new Base64Decoder();
// this is decoding the embed variables that are passed in
decoder.decode(Application.application.parameters.source);
var byteArray:ByteArray = decoder.flush();
var src:String = byteArray.readUTFBytes(byteArray.length);
mw.source = 'http://www.filtrbox.com/rss/'+src;

So lately I have been interested in the Tour de France and wanted to create a quick app centered around that. The requirement of the app was to display the most up to date quality news about the Tour de France on my desktop as a widget. With the power of Filtrbox, I can add exclusions like steroids or other thing that i really dont want to deal with.  If you just want to add the feed to your personal blog, you can embed code for the Filtrbox widget from the Filtrbox dashboard, that is built in Flex and is constantly developing and expanding into new semantic search territory.