Combining RSS feeds with Yahoo Pipes

If, like me, you have multiple blogs, Yahoo! Pipes provides a great way to combine the feeds from all your sites into a single feed.

If you’ve not used Pipes before, it’s worth taking time to understand what it can do. Put simply, it’s a visual interface that lets you manipulate data feeds from just about any web site, combine, edit, sort and merge them, send them to other sites, and generally mess around with them in cool ways.

Combining RSS feeds is one of the simpler things Pipes can do, but it’s also the most useful. As well as using it to provide a single, unified feed of all my blogs, I also use it to generate a dynamic home page featuring all my latest blog posts.

So here’s how you do it:

1. First, log in to Yahoo Pipes using your Yahoo login.
2. Select ‘Create Pipe’ from the top menu
3. Drag a ‘Fetch Feed’ control (listed under ‘Sources’) onto the canvas and enter the URL of your RSS feed into the URL box. Repeat this for all your RSS feeds.
4. Under ‘Operators’, drag a ‘Union’ control onto the canvas.
5. Connect the bottom of each of your feeds to the top of the Union control.
6. Drag a ‘Sort’ control (also under ‘Operators’) onto the canvas and connect the top of this to the bottom of the Union control. Then change the default Sort By to ‘item.pubDate’ and ‘descending order’
7. Connect the bottom of the sort control to the Pipe Output control.
8. Finally, save your Pipe. It should look something like the diagram below.

And that’s all there is to it. If you want to, you can pass your newly created RSS feed to Feedburner too. That gives you all the benefits of Feedburner, as well as a cleaner looking URL for your feed.

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