Sunday, February 26th, 2006, 5:56 am
Aggregating Feeds
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ESTERDAY I received an E-mail from a stranger. The message contained a much-sought-for answer to a question which I had asked several weeks ago. This came to show the advantages of asking questions in public forums (news:alt.www.webmaster). What was my question then? Well, my intent was to merge multiple feeds and deliver them as just one aggregated feed. There were issues with implementation of such tools:
- Formats and versioning, e.g. Atom, RSS v. 1, RSS v. 2
- Tolerance for invalidity of feeds
- Sorting in merger based on category/time
I wound up finding RSS Merge, which enabled me to compose the following page. It combines various feeds from my main domain. Another Open Source package that is worth mentioning would be Planet. My only complaint (wishlist item rather) is that the tools do not deliver aggregated output in feed form. They are merely echoed as Web pages.
