2006-01-08

Merging RSS / Atom feeds, and teaming up

Where are the online tools for merging feeds? I thought this would be something a quick Google search away, or tags peek at Del.icio.us but to my surprise, I only found two,
  1. feedjumbler, which was so broken to the naked eye I had to peek at Google's cached version to see that it would indeed have been what I wanted, and

  2. Blogdigger, which would let me setup a merged feed, and then deliver an empty feed. Update: As noted in the comments below, this is actually an expected result, due to an (at my time of visiting) undisclosed initial indexing delay.

Oh, well. Maybe I just had really bad search karma today. The real solution to the above problem still lies over at userscripts.org, where Jesse and Britt have been really busy doing other things lately. With a bit of luck, I'll be able to join the team to do some tweaking and feature additions myself in a while, such as creating aggregate RSS feeds of all comments to scripts from a particular author, which was what I set out to do above.

This is one of the things I really like about many of the really good projects on the web today -- the barrier to joining in to help out has felt much lower than it used to do a few years ago, at least to me. Prove yourself capable and worthy of trust, acquaint or befriend the people behind the web fronts and team up with them, for the good of the project. You also make a lot of really good friends with people who, much like yourself, want to improve the web and its tools.

Everybody wins.
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7 comments:

  1. Sorry about the empty feed; Groups sometimes takes a while to index feeds if we don't already know about them (we're working on speeding this up). I've set your feeds for an update, they should be indexed within an hour. If I can do anything else, let me know. Thanks for checking out Blogdigger.

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  2. Ah, that explains things. I was quite surprised not to see any errors, actually.

    Might I suggest putting some description in plain text on, say, the group management page? It could read "Expect a delay of an hour up to a day before the feed has been populated", or whatever likely times, for instance -- as a way of letting your users know the conditions the service is working on? (And as predicted response times change, update the documentation accordingly.) I'm sure I'm not alone about suspecting the service is down after having added a few feeds known to have at least some entry in them.

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  3. When it comes to aggreagating stuff, you could look at SuprGlu, a quick way of getting your PlanetJohan up and running.

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  4. FeedShake is another service that merges feeds together

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  5. Excellent suggestions; thank you both!

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  6. Yes, FeedJumbler is currently kind of broken. I don't know what exactly the problem is - I'll try and fix it though. Unfortunately, I have been on the road for the whole weekend ...

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Limited HTML (such as <b>, <i>, <a>) is supported. (All comments are moderated by me amd rel=nofollow gets added to links -- to deter and weed out monetized spam.)

I would prefer not to have to do this as much as you do. Comments straying too far off the post topic often lost due to attention dilution.

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