Last September I wrote a dissatisfied piece about SpeedyFeed, through which you could get several RSS feeds into one place. The trouble with it, as far as I could work out, was that you could not get the feeds to merge in date order. I've had a note to myself to take a look at Yahoo! Pipes for some months and I finally got round to it just now. Within a few minutes I was able to solve the problem, and above is a screen-shot of the what the Yahoo Pipes interface looked like to cause 4 RSS feeds to be firstly combined, and secondly sorted in date order. The output from the "pipe" is itself an RSS feed.
Currently I am using Google's Reader to merge some of the RSS feeds from web logs that I keep an eye on, and to integrate the mergeds feed into my home page; and Reader does the merging in date order OK, and it renders the merged feeds in a clever and clear way. But anyone with a logical mind, and better still some programming know-how should be able to make Yahoo! Pipes do a great deal more, probably making it worth spending USD10 on this newly published ~60 page O'Reilly Short Cuts Guide by Mark Pruett.
You may be interested in http://www.afeeda.com which was a runner-up in the recent Sheffield Barcamp and looks to be a very useful tool for aggregating and sanitising RSS content.
It has being developed quickly, and in terms of solving the problem of aggregating RSS feeds on a subject into one, it seems pretty good. It's also a local Sheffield solution, which is nice!
Ian
Posted by: Ian Wild | 18/06/2007 at 12:59