Seeking an RSS aggregator

May 21, 2004 11:04 AM

Which, if any, RSS aggregators can take items from multiple feeds and display them in reverse-chronological order, interfiling items from different feeds? [More Inside]

e.g.,
- Most recent item (from feed A)
- Second most recent item (from feed B)
- Third most recent item (from feed A)
- Fourth most recent item (from feed C)

I'm aware that publication date & time didn't become part of the RSS specification until RSS 2.0, so this would only work with 2.0 feeds, but I'd still like to be able to do it. I've looked at these previous threads on RSS aggregators, but didn't see anything useful there. Either web-based or running in Windows XP would be acceptable. I'm willing to consider paying, so don't limit yourself to free options.

posted by DevilsAdvocate to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Umm, all of them? I've haven't seen a late-model RSS aggregator that doesn't have this ability, unless it was one designed strictly to display a ticker. In the case of RSS 1.0 feeds, they usually use the date of download instead of the pub date.
posted by Mo Nickels at 11:10 AM on May 21, 2004

Response by poster: Really? I admit, I haven't actually tried any in quite some time, but looking at screenshots of the various ones out there, they seem to always be sorted first by feed, not by date. Didn't see anything like that mentioned in the "features" section of any of them, either. (Nothing like that in the screenshots, nothing like that under "features," what was I supposed to conclude?)
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:16 AM on May 21, 2004

Newsgator and Feeddemon can both do this.
posted by Argyle at 11:17 AM on May 21, 2004

If you use a Mac, I know PulpFiction and NetNewsWire both do this.

You can even organize your feeds into folders and then these folders can be set to show in order of date/time. I would think any Reader that uses columns would allow you to sort by that column in ascending or descending order.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 11:51 AM on May 21, 2004

Kinja!
posted by mecran01 at 12:18 PM on May 21, 2004

Response by poster: Giving it a quick test-drive, Kinja looks very nice, and may be just what I was looking for. I'll check it out more deeply, and compare some of the others, later.

Sorry, RB, but I don't have a Mac.

FWIW, Bloglines does not have this capability. Or else they've hidden it so well that I can't find it.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:20 PM on May 21, 2004

You can also do a similar kind of thing with reBlog. It lets you select feeds to aggregate into a single movable type blog.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 1:41 PM on May 21, 2004

SharpReader lets you view all the posts together as well as seperately per feed. In either case you can sort them however you want.
posted by mmascolino at 1:42 PM on May 21, 2004

I heavily recommend for NetNewsWire and NNW Lite for Mac.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 3:14 PM on May 21, 2004