Stick two RSS feeds together

Use Yahoo Pipes to take any number of feeds, mash them together and get one feed out the end.

I've just started experimenting with Yahoo Pipes, an online programme that allows you to collect data from different sources (RSS feeds, searches, websites...), filter this information (by date, type, size...) and then output it into a single feed (if that's what you want).

All the brackets in the above sentence highlight the flexibility of this programme and the functionality is huge, I’ve just been shown three different ways one of my colleagues is using Yahoo Pipes to mash-up data on our websites. Anyway, I’m just using it for RSS combining for the time being.

I have two feeds i want to stick together. They are:

• BBC F1 News
  http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/motorsport/formula_one/rss.xml
• ITV F1 News
  http://www.itv-f1.com/rss/

So i 'fetch feed' for the two RSS feeds above. I then combine them with a 'Union' operator. I want them to be mixed up and sorted in date order so i 'sort' by date ('item.pubDate' to be precise).

I finally connect the pipe output to produce:

• Yahoo pipes combined feed
  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=pAsJ2fbi3RGF6xy6_w6H4A&_render=rss

Done. You can now stick this feed through feedburner if you wish so that you can track subscriptions and let feedburner handle the caching.

• Feedburner feed
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/itvandbbcf1feed

There's loads more you can play with in Yahoo Pipes and also many ways to get the desired results. I had to play with the 'sort' to get the date order i wanted. Yahoo Pipes discussion boards have loads of tips which helped me figure this out.