Have you ever had a bunch of RSS feeds that were very similar and that you wished were just one aggregate feed? For instance, many sites publish a number of feeds for different parts of their content, and it would often be more useful to have all that content in one feed so you don’t have to check multiple sources for the content.
Or, have you ever had a bunch of feeds that share a certain topic and that you’d rather be in one feed rather than separated?
Yahoo Pipes offers a simple way to aggregate feeds. Yahoo Pipes is a service that has a wide range of applications and can be used for some fairly complex tasks. For this example, we will use it to easily perform three tasks:
- Retrieve a number of RSS feeds
- Aggregate and sort the feeds
- Republish the feeds as a single RSS feed
If you do not already have a Yahoo! account, the first thing you will have to do is register. Otherwise, simply go to pipes.yahoo.com and sign in. After signing in, go to Create a Pipe…
In the left-hand column there will be a number of modules you can click and drag over to the editing surface. Under Sources, click and drag the Fetch Feed module.
Add the feeds you would like aggregated to the Fetch Feed module. Simply paste the RSS feeds into the box, clicking the plus icon to add new text boxes to the module…
Once the feeds are in place, drag the Sort module over located under Operators. Connect the output of the Fetch Feed module to the Sort module and set the Sort module to sort the content by pubDate in descending order…
Connect the Sort module output to the Pipe Output module, name and save your Pipe…
Run your Pipe and voila! You have a customized, aggregated single feed of the content you want!
Here is a video of the whole process (here for full screen version)…
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