Combine RSS feeds into new feed?

March 23, 2005 11:13 AM

I know there have been several RSS-related questions, but I couldn't find the answer to the specific scenario I'm looking for. I want to combine several of my published RSS feeds into a single combined RSS feed.

I'm a happy paying customer of CaRP, and I have used Bloglines and the like. All of them, however, seem to focus on "web-friendly presentation" of RSS feeds. That is, a My Yahoo!-like page where the feeds that I like are all posted neatly together. What I want is to take all those feeds and publish a new RSS feed, not a nice web page.

Feedburner calls this "feed parsing" or "splicing," I believe. But they are basically only allowing you to take your blog feed, and to mix it with your Flickr or de.licio.us feeds. That is, one blog, and maybe two specific services. I want to combine several text feeds, albeit all on the same domain.

FWIW, this is for a Movable Type powered site, where I run an online journal, weblog, moblog, and review sections, each with their own RSS feed. I'd love to give folks a single XML file that mixes 'em all up. I don't suppose there's an easy way to do this in Movable Type?

posted by pzarquon to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Response by poster: By the way, I'm looking at the MultiBlog plugin for MT... but this basically means starting yet another blog within MT just to get its RSS feed... which I've yet to determine even works.
posted by pzarquon at 11:23 AM on March 23, 2005

Best answer: MultiBlog is what I would've suggested. You should be able to get content from you other sections into your main RSS feed.
posted by rschroed at 11:40 AM on March 23, 2005

Feedburner is working on the arbitrary-feed-splicing functionality and is rumored to be close to releasing it.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 12:03 PM on March 23, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks for the quick replies. I installed MultiBlog, inserted its tags into my RSS/Atom index templates, and half an hour later, voila, locally-generated aggregate feed. I'll definitely keep an eye on Feedburner (so I can mix feeds across domains/CMSes), but this'll work great for now.
posted by pzarquon at 12:15 PM on March 23, 2005

Here's how Eric Benson does it using Bloglines. I'd like to do this as well but am NOT using Movable Type and have been amazed at how this should be something easily doable but isn't, like how Feedpapers are supposed to work in Feedster, but don't. I have an all feeds feed on blogdigger groups but some of my feeds don't really seem to show up there, or not until days later which is sort of not that useful.
posted by jessamyn at 12:18 PM on March 23, 2005

You can also do it the kludgey way and make a friends list out of your feeds on livejournal. Of course someone has to then make feeds for your sites on livejournal, so I don't recommend this but it will work.
posted by jessamyn at 12:19 PM on March 23, 2005

Here are some articles and resources on the subject:

• E Pluriblog Unum: Merging RSS Feeds, by Kent Sharkey.
• Combining RSS feeds into one feed and page, by Phil Gyford.
• Reblog has a tool called refeed, which looks like it might be useful for combining and republishing feeds.
• You can also aggregate and collate with MagpieRSS, an RSS parser in PHP.
• Erik Benson uses the Bloglines API and a Ruby script to aggregate a number of feeds.

I haven't tried this, so I can't give you any personal experience with any of these methods.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 12:42 PM on March 23, 2005

As long as all your content sources are in the one Movable Type instance you should be golden. However you want to branch out and incorporate other stuff, you might look at Planet Planet which is a python based app that aggregates feeds together and creates a site and a combined RSS feed. Ignore the generated site and just use the combined RSS feed.
posted by mmascolino at 2:22 PM on March 23, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone, for the additional links. I admit, while MT has annoyed me as of late, the simplicity of the MultiBlog solution was impressive. Still, I also run WordPress blogs, so cross-platform, cross-domain stuff will probably enter the picture eventually.

As to Bloglines, Feedster Feedpapers, and LiveJournal... all are interesting, but require a third-party server to remain available.

Ignore the generated site and just use the combined RSS feed.

That's what I find so weird about most of the solutions out there. Even my MultiBlog solution comes with a dummy blog, when all I want is the feed.
posted by pzarquon at 2:45 PM on March 23, 2005

yay multiblog!
posted by anildash at 10:04 PM on March 24, 2005

Disclaimer: This is mine, but for what it's worth, RSS Digest (which really sounds like it should support it already) will also support feed splicing in its next incarnation, in a few weeks' time. I can't wait, I already have a ton of places to use it myself..
posted by wackybrit at 2:14 AM on March 25, 2005