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.

Aren't Google Alerts clever?

I've just discovered Google Alerts. For those who like me before yesterday, are unaware of the usefulness of this cunning little gadget let me tell you using my two days of experience.

You type in a search term, for example one of mine is "web marketing", and then every day (or however often you specify), Google sends you a lovely little email containing recent blog posts and news regarding this subject.

Previous to this breakthrough i used to keep up to date through a selection of RSS feeds on my iGoogle page, by having a quick dabble on search engines once every couple of weeks, maybe receive some useful emails from friends, read a bit here and there in magazines not targeted at web (such as Marketing and Marketing Week) e.t.c.

Now i get some nice summaries every day, inevitably i click through to two or three and then due to the nature of blogs i also end up wandering through some other posts linked from these.

I'm now far more in the loop than i was before as most mornings I do 15 minutes of really relevant surfing, not to mention still doing everything that i did before on an ad hoc basis.

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Image and author details can be found on Wikipedia.