Please Note: The ResearchBuzz Gizmos have moved to a new home at SearchGizmos.com. The Gizmos no longer look like these screenshots, but work the same.

Do you ever suffer from Temporary Curiosity?

I have a terrible time with it. I’ll hear about something that happened, or an event that’s coming up, and I’ll want to know how it proceeds. Periodically I’ll wonder what’s going on with it.

Of course I can just remember to search on it. If I do remember. I certainly don’t want to put a searching followup in my calendar; I don’t care THAT much.

I could also set up a keyword-based RSS feed for the object of my curiosity so I get updates when I’m doing my regular feed reviewing. The problem with that is I have to remember to remove the feed again — and I have a LOT of RSS feeds. If I added just one every time I was curious about something, I’d be overwhelmed with feeds in no time.

So I made JOOC Box, which generates RSS feeds with expiration dates in the title. It also bundles the feeds into an OPML file so you can easily import them into your favorite RSS feed reader. It’s available at https://searchgizmos.com/2022/10/10/jooc-box/ .

(If you’re wondering what JOOC means, it’s Internet slang for “Just Out Of Curiosity”. I thought it was pronounced “juke”, which would make the name of this app sound like “Juke Box,” but I see on the Urban Dictionary it’s pronounced “joos,” making the app “Juice Box.” Either way the pun works.)

JOOC Box asks for a query you want to monitor and how many days you want to monitor for.

When you click the Whip Up Some Feeds button, the following things happen:

1) JOOC box makes keyword-based feeds featuring your query for Bing, Bing News, Google News, WordPress, and Reddit. Each feed has a title containing your specified “expiration date”.

2) The feeds are bundled into an OPML file with a title that features your query and expiration date:
JOOC Box_OPML_File_For_’pumpkin%2520spice’_expiring_9_20_2022.opml

3) That file is automatically downloaded to wherever you save downloads on your computer. It’s plain text; you can easily open it with a text editor if you want to see what it looks like (mostly like an overfed RSS feed.)

If you’re not familiar with OPML files and how they work, Lifewire has a good overview article with plenty of links to tools.

So what good does this do? I have some keyword-based RSS feeds, but I won’t I lose track of them in my feed reader? Nope, because they have dates in the title! I am using these RSS feeds with Feedly . Feedly has a feed management section where I can search for feeds by title. Every time I start using Feedly I’ll simply search for the current date to see if there are any feeds I need to throw away. Here’s what that search looks like.

… to be honest I feel a little weird about sharing JOOC Box because I might have made something only I would use. When I told my husband about it he thought it was a bit silly. But what can I say? Temporary curiosity is my affliction.

Besides, I will use it!