How do I create a daily digest ?
June 4, 2010 6:01 AM Subscribe
How do I create a digest of RSS feeds ? possibly as an RSS feed itself ? for free ?
There are a couple of RSS Feeds that I subscribe to that are to heavy-volume. I'd like to turn them into a "daily-digest" type of feed - kind-of like the digest one can get when subscribing to a mailing list or a google group.
I'm thinking it should be possible with something like yahoo pipes, but I don't understand how I would do it.
I've looked at this too - but the feedblitz service is now a for-pay service.
There are a couple of RSS Feeds that I subscribe to that are to heavy-volume. I'd like to turn them into a "daily-digest" type of feed - kind-of like the digest one can get when subscribing to a mailing list or a google group.
I'm thinking it should be possible with something like yahoo pipes, but I don't understand how I would do it.
I've looked at this too - but the feedblitz service is now a for-pay service.
After you setup the Yahoo Pipes, you'll have an RSS feed. Then you can use Yahoo Alerts to send the content of that feed to you via email. Choose one email a day. Now you have a daily digest.
posted by qmechanic at 7:03 AM on June 4, 2010
posted by qmechanic at 7:03 AM on June 4, 2010
Yahoo Pipes in itself seems to be missing a decent way of concatenating items in a feed. I think you can use a combination of Yahoo! Query Language and YQL Execute to manually parse the feed. Here's an article on the Pipes Blog.
Either way, I don't think it's an easy thing to accomplish. Besides, it only makes sense to have an RSS digest feed visually (a single item in the RSS reader), but it wouldn't be a real RSS item, because it does not have a title or an URL to point to etc.
I would expect high-volume websites to provide a daily digest via RSS themselves... now THAT would be nice. Or at least the RSS reader should have the option to show a feed in daily digest mode.
posted by danburzo at 7:36 AM on June 4, 2010
Either way, I don't think it's an easy thing to accomplish. Besides, it only makes sense to have an RSS digest feed visually (a single item in the RSS reader), but it wouldn't be a real RSS item, because it does not have a title or an URL to point to etc.
I would expect high-volume websites to provide a daily digest via RSS themselves... now THAT would be nice. Or at least the RSS reader should have the option to show a feed in daily digest mode.
posted by danburzo at 7:36 AM on June 4, 2010
Response by poster: mmascolino : the union operator will merge 5 different feeds, but won't merge 5 different items into a single item.
danburzo : YQL sounds like an interesting idea - I'm able to parse the feed - and I've played manually with the rss item builder item - but I can't seem to be able to connect the two together -- what I want to do is something like : for each item, concatenate values in a huge string, then assign it to the item content (I think ?) - but how do I connect the output of a loop to a single item ?
posted by motdiem2 at 8:53 AM on June 4, 2010
danburzo : YQL sounds like an interesting idea - I'm able to parse the feed - and I've played manually with the rss item builder item - but I can't seem to be able to connect the two together -- what I want to do is something like : for each item, concatenate values in a huge string, then assign it to the item content (I think ?) - but how do I connect the output of a loop to a single item ?
posted by motdiem2 at 8:53 AM on June 4, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by mmascolino at 6:23 AM on June 4, 2010