Looking for a powerful, replacement RSS aggregation tool

November 7, 2015 8:34 PM

I used Yahoo Pipes to make a fantastic literature skimmer, but now it is dead and I'm struggling to find a replacement.

I want to make an RSS feed that helps me keep up to date on the scientific literature from several different journals.

I would like that feed to be able to do the following:

1. Aggregate multiple different RSS feeds (i.e. Journals BRAIN, HEART, LUNG)
2. Add a prefix to every URL (i.e. my library's bookmarklet link)
3. Have the title of every link be "BRAIN article: Title, "

I had done this very successfully in Yahoo Pipes (thanks, in my ways to an answer to a previous question), but now Pipes is dead and I am lost. I've looked at the resources link to in this previous post, but none seem up to the task.

I am willing to spend some time learning and/or spend some money in the process. Many thanks for your eternal wisdom, oh mighty hive.

posted by cacofonie to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Response by poster: Forgot to add, for those who are curious, this is the JSON file of my lovely, deceased, yahoo pipe.
posted by cacofonie at 8:36 PM on November 7, 2015

Best answer: You might look at Tiny Tiny RSS. Takes a bit of getting used to but I haven't looked back since I started using it
posted by FelineoidEntity at 10:14 PM on November 7, 2015

Have you tried dlvr.it? I'm not sure if it's up to the task, but it's worth a look. I use it to turn an RSS feed into Tweets and it works great.

I'm pretty sure your request is beyond what IFTTT is designed to do, but it might be worth a look.
posted by Nelson at 8:33 AM on November 8, 2015

Best answer: Zapier can do all these things. Their post "Make Your Own RSS Superfeed" describes how to do most of this. For #2, simply replace {{link}} with something like http://mylibrary.example.com/fetcharticle?{{link}}. For #3, replace {{title}} with BRAIN: title for your brain feed.
posted by grouse at 11:26 AM on November 17, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks!

I ended up using FelineoidEntity's advice and installing tt-RSS.

It was a bit of a pain for someone with no coding background, but I found a plugin that could use regex to modify feeds (feedcleaner) and modified the output feed by changing the generated_feed.txt template (surprisingly easy).

Zapier looks like it might work too (and might have been easier).

Thanks for your help.
posted by cacofonie at 12:47 PM on November 26, 2015