Stream Spigot

This Stream Spigot tool lets you read blogs (or anything else with an RSS or Atom feed) from the beginning. In addition to being useful for newly-discovered blogs with big archives, it also works well for topical "advent" blogs or if you want to learn something new.

Simply enter the URL of the blog or feed that you wish to play back, and (optionally) pick a start date and update frequency if you don't want to read it from the beginning. Once the playback is setup, you'll get an Atom feed URL that you can subscribe to.

The tool uses Google Reader's feed archive to get data, which means that if a blog predates Google Reader (which launched in October 2005) it may be missing posts.

The Atom feed that is generated is a Google Reader tag feed. This means that Reader metadata about the original post (who shared or liked it, published and crawl date, etc.) is preserved, and content is not duplicated. However, you do not have to use Google Reader to subscribe to it, any consumer of Atom 1.0 should work just as well.