Consolidate multiple RSS feeds into one
So this blog post might be “out of topic” in comparison to my other posts, but this was just too cool to skip.
While working on my company’s new public web site, Lumagate.com, I had to consolidate all RSS feeds from each and every consultants blog site and then turn them into one single page. I could easily create a site based on one RSS feed, but I didn’t have one feed, I had a lot of them. First I thought that feedly or something like that could do the work but I quickly found that it couldn’t. In addition, I wanted to only take the latest two entries from each feed.
After some searching online I stumpled upon Pipes developed by Yahoo (yes, that’s correct). The service even allowed me to fix some data that otherwise made some trouble for me since the different blog services publish some data in different fields (such as ‘creator’ or ‘author’).
The service reminds me of Orchestrator, but is web/cloud based. First I fetch a feed, then I truncate it to only get the latest two posts. Then depending on the need, I put the feed into a loop and for each entry inside the feed (two posts, since it’s been truncated), I alter the meta data. Such as adding/altering the Author field. After that I add the different feeds into a larger feed. Due to limitations in the Unison feature, I had to merge them a couple of times to make all flows fit. Before I return the feed out to a new RSS feed, I sort all the objects based on publish date.
If you would like to, you can do ALOT more things, but this was enough for me. Go try it out why don’t you 
/Tim
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