FeedBlender - Combine multiple RSS feeds into one blended feed
Posted on January 11, 2008 at 6:25 am
Currently, I subscribe to well over 150 feeds and I use Google Reader to manage my feeds. It’s not a bad system except for the fact that Google Reader does not yet support folders so that I can separate my feeds into different categories like Tech, News, Sports, etc. Right now everything is just there in one big lump.
And even when Google Reader does support Folders, you’ll still have to click on each individual feed in the folder to view all your posts. It would be really nice, however, if you could take 10 feeds in Google Reader and combine then into one feed.
That way, if I’m looking for a new job, I can take the job feeds from Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, etc and scroll though all the latest jobs at one time! Or maybe I can go to Flickr and find some tags that I really enjoy and grab the RSS tag feed for each one (via the tags page) and combine them into one Flickr image feed!
Since Google Reader does not support this yet, you can use another service called FeedBlender to do it for you! FeedBlender is cool! It takes the feeds you give it, pull the individual entries from each of them, attempts to sort them in date order, and then creates a new blended feed of all entries.
There are actually a couple of really cool ways to use FeedBlender which I had not thought of until I read the “Tips” page on their site. Here are a couple of examples of how you can use combined feeds:
- Got multiple calendars in Google Calendar and want a single RSS feed of all of your events? Blend the feed for each one together and then subscribe to your blended feed of all of them!
- Make your own radio station or TV channel by blending together your favorite podcasts or vlogs, because FeedBlendr now supports “enclosures”!
- Click on over to del.icio.us and load up all the tags that you are interested in. Again, grab the feeds for each tag, and then blend them up for a delicious link-smoothie.
- Love gadgets? (Me too!). FeedBlendr is perfect for creating a ‘master’ gadgets feed. Roll around to your favorite sites (perhaps Engadget, Gizmodo, The Gadgeteer and Gadget Lounge) and grab all of their feed URLs, drop them into FeedBlendr and you’ve got yourself a gadget-blend to end all gadget-blends.
- Blend together a few tags over at Technorati (go to one of the tag pages, and there’s a blue RSS link at the bottom of the page) to get a combined view of what’s happening in the blogosphere around certain topics.
That’s pretty neat! The best thing about FeedBlender is that it’s very simple and doesn’t have a lot of complicated bells and whistles. I tried out another similar service like this before called FeedHub, that combines multiple feeds into one, but it had too much logic and ended up being more of a pain because it didn’t work.
Just paste in the feed URL for as many feeds as you like or you can import an OPML file.
You can export a OPML file of your feeds from Google Reader by going to Settings at the top and then clicking on Import/Export. Click on Export your subscriptions as an OPML file.
Overall, it’s a very cool service and works exceptionally well! After you click Blend Your Feed, you’ll get a URL that you can subscribe to and see everything at once. Go ahead and subscribe via Google Reader or from your favorite RSS reader. Enjoy! Source FriedBeef
Technorati Tags: rss feed, feedblender, blend rss feeds, combine rss feeds, multiple rss feeds, aggregate feeds, combined feed
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Hi,
My Google Reader definitely supports folders. The only thing it doesn’t do is let me view ever post at one (that’s probably a good thing), so forces me to divide them up as you say, tech, sport, niche sites etc.
Google Reader does support folders.
Once you’ve added the feed, go to Manage subscriptions find the feed that you want to move to a new folder, then on the far right where it says Change folders, select the down arrow, then select New folder and the feed will be put into that new folder. You can even drag previous feeds into the new folder. I have made News, Tech and Sports folders in Google Reader in this way.
Also when you are viewing feeds if you click on the folder icon on the left side (below Add subscription)it will show all feeds in that folder as one feed.
colin_w
Guys, thanks a lot for the info! I didn’t even know you can do this! I was looking for a way in Google Reader, but could not find it. Great news!
Though in what kind of way does it show all the feeds in a folder? Sorted by date and mixed up or is it grouped by the feed?
All the feeds in a particular folder are sorted by date and mixed up. If you want to view just one feed, you click on that feed within the folder and it displays just those feeds.
This is taken from Google Reader Help Centre:
How can I sort my reading list?
The option to sort your reading list is available in either the Feed settings… or View settings… menu, depending on whether you are viewing items from a single feed or from all your subscriptions.
The Sort by oldest option will display items from the last 30 days, in the order they were posted. This is particularly useful for personal journals and other sites for which the chronological order is important. To go back even further, choose Sort by newest and use our infinite scrolling to go back all the way to the first item we ever tracked for this subscription.
When viewing all items, a third option is available, called auto-sort. This works by prioritizing subscriptions with fewer items. So, with this setting, your friend’s blog with one item a month will not be drowned out by higher volume sites such as the New York Times because we’ll raise the blog to the top.