When you edit digests or create new digests there is now a simple “Timezone” field that lets you enter an hour offset (such as -5 for EST, 1 for CET, etc..) so that times output by %HOUR% %TIME24%, etc, and other Feed Digest tags, will show the time adjusted by a certain number of hours.

Feel free to discuss this feature and ask questions here.

Prisca has written a cool blog post about how to republish your del.icio.us items using Feed Digest. Thanks Prisca!

The answer is.. it depends. Generally yes, but we can only show what we have received. Many feed providers only put content excerpts into their feeds as a way to encourage people to click through to their sites. If that is the case, we can only show the excerpt. If the whole article has been provided, however, you can edit your template to show this instead.

In your control panel you can edit your digest, and at the bottom where you choose the template there’s an option to edit your template ‘manually’. When you do this you see the ‘guts’ of your template. There’ll be a bit that looks something like %DESCRIPTIONPLAIN,100% for example. This means it’ll show the item’s description trimmed to 100 characters. Change that 100 to a higher number, or just use %DESCRIPTIONPLAIN% to show -everything- we have for each item :)

General Tags

%TITLE% – The title of the item

%URL% – The URL of the item

%DESCRIPTION% – The raw description / summary of the item

%DESCRIPTIONPLAIN% – The description / summary of the item with HTML removed.

%DESCRIPTIONPLAINWITHBR% – The same as %DESCRIPTIONPLAIN% but with line feeds respected.

%DESCRIPTIONUNESCAPED% – For tricky descriptions that come out double-encoded with the other choices.

Note that a comma followed by a number in any tag trims it to that length.. so %DESCRIPTIONPLAIN,100% means a plain description of up to 100 characters in length. %DESCRIPTIONPLAIN,100NODOTS% removes the trailing dots used.

Date Tags

%YEAR% – The year (e.g. 2005)

%YEAR2% – The year in two digit form (e.g. 05)

%MONTH% – The month in numeric form (e.g. 9)

%MONTH2% – The month in two digit form (e.g. 09)

%MONTHLONG% – The item’s month’s full name (e.g. January)

%MONTHSHORT% – The item’s month’s short name (e.g. Jan)

%DAY% – The day of the month in numeric form (e.g. 4)

%DAY2% – The day of the month in two digit numeric form (e.g. 04)

%DAYLONG% – The item’s weekday’s full name (e.g. Monday)

%DAYSHORT% – The item’s weekday’s short name (e.g. Mon)

Time Tags

%TIME12% – The item’s time in 12 hour format (e.g. 2:08 PM)

%TIME24% – The item’s time in 24 hour format (e.g. 14:08)

%HOUR% – The item’s hour (e.g. 2)

%HOUR2% – The item’s hour in two digit form (e.g. 02)

%MINUTE% – The item’s minute (e.g. 8)

%MINUTE2% – The item’s minute in two digit form (e.g. 08)

%SECOND% – The item’s second (e.g. 7)

%SECOND2% – The item’s second in two digit form (e.g. 07)

%TIMEAGO,FULL% – The item’s date in relative terms in full precision.. (e.g. “5 years, 2 days, 12 hours, 7 minutes, and 3 seconds ago”)

%TIMEAGO% – The item’s date in relative terms in middling precision (e.g. “5 years, 2 days ago”)

%TIMEAGO,SHORT% – The item’s date in relative terms of least precision (e.g.”5 years ago” or “2 days ago” or “2 minutes ago”)

Feed Tags

%SOURCENAME% – The item’s feed’s name / title (e.g. “My Blog”)

%SOURCEURL% – The item’s feed’s regular URL (e.g. http://www.someblog.com/)

%SOURCEFEEDURL% – The URL of the item’s source feed itself.

%SOURCEDESCRIPTION% – The item’s feed’s description (e.g. “A blog about nothing.”)

%SOURCEID% – A unique ID number of the source. Ideal for putting into CSS class names for per-feed styling, etc.

Tag Modifiers

%TAG,10% – When you use a tag and follow it with a comma and a number, the tag’s output is truncated to that number of characters. For example, %DESCRIPTIONPLAIN,100% will show the first 100 characters of the description / summary of an item. This can be useful if you want to ensure certain elements in the digest don’t go over a certain length, such as titles and descriptions, both of which can be long.

<lowercase> .. </lowercase> – Anything between these two tags is changed to be all in lower case.

<uppercase> .. </uppercase> – Anything between these two tags is converted to upper case.

<capitalize> .. </capitalize> – Anything between these two tags is capitalized / titleized.. It Means It Would Look Like This Text Here.

<ifdescription> .. </ifdescription> – Anything between these two tags is ONLY included IF the current item has a description. Use this to clean up digests which have combinations of items with no descriptions and longer descriptions.

<gsub from=”text1″ to=”text2″> .. </gsub> – Performs a substitution from ‘text1′ to ‘text2′ within the block.

According to the guys over at TalkingApe.com, FeedDigest.com is one of six sites making the net “super awesome.” Awesome!

(Update – Feb 2007: It’s just a shame that post no longer exists :()