How can I create my own website aggregator?

June 4, 2012 8:03 AM

How can I make a sharable aggregate of interesting news and blog articles with a set URL?

Please be kind as I'm way out of my element on this one. I don't even know enough to know if this is a dumb question or what words to search for. Even some useful vocab would help.

I'd like to make a collection of my favorite websites and blogs and synthesize them into one website/URL. I'd like this URL to be viewable by anyone. So an account based service might not work.

For example, I like to read articles from elitefts.com, tnation.com, eric cressey's blog, and Sweat Science.

I'd like to somehow get these in one place, more or less automatically once the parameters have been set.

So I know there some useful aggregator sites out there. I still check popurls.com fairly regularly. I'm not exactly sure where services like Google Reader are nowadays. I know the functionality has changed a lot since I last used it. I've tried fiddling around with RSS readers like RSSOWL but I don't understand the functionality.

Anyway, where do I begin to do something like this? Is there a service? Software? Do I need to hire someone to write some code? I probably read 30+ blogs and sites a day. More importantly, I'm in a position where I need to share articles with other people as quickly as possible. I'd like to just give my clients one link that would contain everything.

posted by Telf to technology (6 answers total)

Yahoo Pipes might be what you're looking for. I've used it to create RSS feeds for websites that don't otherwise offer them. There are some good tutorials, and I learned from the many, many examples on offer.
posted by jquinby at 8:11 AM on June 4, 2012

On an Android phone I like the Google Reader app for doing this. Subscribe to a sites RSS feed in the app and then it'll merrily update you. It'll do the same in your computer browser.

If you want to make a site to aggregate your feeds then using Yahoo Pipes to put together a single RSS feed from a bunch of separate ones and then Wordpress with an rss plugin like this to display them is what I use. This depends on your level of comfort with some pretty basic web stuff.
posted by merocet at 8:35 AM on June 4, 2012

Do you have hosting and a domain? I've installed the (free) Aggregator theme for WordPress and it's very easy to set up and maintain.
posted by humph at 8:50 AM on June 4, 2012

I experimented with several of the self hosted feed aggregators over the last year as part of a project to de-Goggleize my online life. When I could get an open source aggregator app running, they were painfully slow on my list of about 200 sites that I want to follow. I went back to Bloglines.
posted by COD at 10:07 AM on June 4, 2012

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the help so far. Pipes looks incredibly powerful. Not much luck with it so far, working on the tutorials.

I've encountered a problem where some sites don't seem to produce usable feeds. For example, T-Nation, (Silly, I know.) will produce a usable feed through RSSOWL but nothing I can use on Pipes.

I'll continue to mess around, as I'm sure the answer is something simple.
posted by Telf at 8:22 PM on June 4, 2012

Looks like T-Nations rss feed is http://www.t-nation.com/portal_includes/rss/articles20.jsp

Often just a quick right click on a site, choosing "view source" and then control-f to find "rss" will get you the hidden goodies.

Of you want help on pipes send me a message and I'll share my set up with you. I've already done it so seems silly for someone to start from scratch.
posted by merocet at 3:59 PM on June 6, 2012