9 replies to this topic

[bwelford]

I've done a little searching for a solution and haven't found one so perhaps others may point me in the right direction.

I have four online properties (3 blogs and a website article collection), each of which has its own RSS news feed. I wish to create automatically a combined RSS news feed so that anyone can check on whatever I may have written recently. This would in a sense aggregate the four individual news feeds into one single news feed. I've searched a little around FeedBurner but cannot see any tool there for this.

Can anyone think of an easy way of doing this?

[eKstreme]

Two ways:

1. Use Yahoo! Pipes to merge all the feeds into one.

2. DIY using SimplePIE which has - shockingly! - a merge feeds function built in.

As a firm believer of controlling as much as you can of your own properties, I favor the latter. Regardless, two tutorials to get you going:

1. http://labnol.blogsp...burner-mix.html
2. http://joshhighland....-simple-as-pie/

Enjoy

Pierre

[bwelford]

Thanks for the links, Pierre. I'll see how I do and report back.

[bwelford]

Well I tried to go the SimplePie route, but failed. There is a sample text of a PHP file you can download. Unfortunately the author acknowledges that it has mistakes and one should correct it to be the same as the text displayed in his blog. With my rudimentary knowledge of PHP, I played around for quite a time but couldn't get a PHP file that would work.

I know you'll be disappointed, Pierre. I then went to Yahoo! Pipes, which worked like a charm. One of the best applications I've seen. I can recommend it to anyone. If you want to create a combined feed of any news feeds at all, then this is certainly a good way to go.

[eKstreme]

Barry, I'm not disappointed: you asked a question and I helped answer it. What else do I want?

Pierre

[bwelford]

Well I guess Yahoo! isn't as big (or as evil?) as Google.

[eKstreme]

Well I guess Yahoo! isn't as big (or as evil?) as Google.

Actually... But let's not get off topic

[bwelford]

A final question comes to mind.

I now have a Yahoo! Pipe, which consists of 4 Feedburner news feeds for 4 blogs. If someone 'subscribes' to the Yahoo! Pipe in say Google Reader, does this translate into subscriptions to the individual Feedburner news feeds? I'm hoping it will work like this, but I'm not sure. What do others think?

[joedolson]

I can't necessarily speak 100% for certain, but I would say with 99% confidence that no, it won't.

You may need to create a new Feedburner channel for the Piped feeds, and just plan on tracking it separately.

[bwelford]

Yes, Joe, I fear you are right on that. I had a little difficulty establishing a channel with Feedburner since the URL for the Pipe includes punctuation (?) that is not acceptable. Eventually I converted the URL to a TinyURL, which was acceptable but again there was some invalidity. Finally I took the feed for the Pipe, converted the URL for that to a TinyURL and that was accepted by Feedburner.