Is there way to "mirror" an RSS feed?

January 20, 2017 2:58 PM

Is there way to "mirror" an RSS feed? That is, duplicate an RSS feed so the same content is reproduced in two different RSS feeds?

Is there way to "mirror" an RSS feed? That is, duplicate an RSS feed so the same content is reproduced in two different feeds?

My org needs this for to migrate to a new social media management tool, Buffer; we're migrating from SocialFlow. We're a news org and we post about 20+ times a day on both Facebook and Twitter. We create unique content (FB posts and Tweets) for each platform, and different team members are assigned to each account (often at the same time of the day).

Like SocialFlow, Buffer supports feeds, but in SocialFlow, an RSS feed is sent directly to each social media account (eg, FB, Twitter) that is being managed. The social media accounts appear as tabs.

In SF this makes it easy to see what needs to be posted, and what has been posted on each account -- Twitter is separated and contained, and Facebook is separate and contained.

In Buffer, the RSS feed (website.org/feed, etc) goes to the Buffer account, and you can choose to post to Facebook OR Twitter OR both.

If you post to Facebook, the link then is removed from the interface, and cannot be (re)posted on Twitter until the Facebook post has gone live.

This is a problem for a couple of reasons -- if we need to make sure all content is posted in a timely fashion on both accounts it makes it tough to see what needs posting.

And we have such a volume of posts that our social media managers cannot keep track of what needs to be posted on the website.

I am looking for a solution to replicate or mirror RSS feeds (one for FB, one for Twitter), but thought AskMe might have a solution.

Thanks!

posted by My Dad to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

In small doses, you can use IFTTT to do things like this, but for a larger volume like this, I would look at Zapier. For either one, you might not have to use RSS at all if Buffer can be used as a source.
posted by soelo at 3:54 PM on January 20, 2017

Response by poster: Thank you. Do you think Zapier would replicate an RSS feed, so we have two feeds with the same content?
posted by My Dad at 4:33 PM on January 20, 2017

Best answer: What you want to do to just "duplicate" an RSS feed is to run it through a proxy. If your organization has any web presence at all, you should be able to proxy content- there are proxies freely available for essentially every language and framework. I recently wrote an RSS proxy in six lines or so of Python using Flask and the Requests library.
posted by rockindata at 5:41 PM on January 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks! That's awesome. I just needed the right vocabulary.
posted by My Dad at 5:57 PM on January 20, 2017