merge rss feeds

Question

I want to merge multiple rss feeds into a single feed, removing any duplicates. Specifically, I'm interested in merging the feeds for the tags I'm interested in.

[A quick search turned up some promising links, which I don't have time to visit at the moment]

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Broadly speaking, the ideal would be a reader that would list all the available tags on the site and toggle them on and off, allowing me to explore what's available, keep track of questions I've visited, new answers on interesting feeds, etc, etc . . . though I don't suppose such a things exists right now.

As I randomly explore the site and see questions I think are interesting, I inevitably find "oh yes, that one looked interesting a couple days ago when I read it the first time, and hasn't been updated since". It would be much nicer if my machine would keep track of such deails for me :)

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Update: You can now use "and", "or", and "not" to combine multiple tags into a single feed: Tags AND Tags OR Tags

Answer 1

Yahoo Pipes?

23 minutes later: Aww, I got answer-sniped by @Bernie Perez. Oh well :)

Answer 2

Have you heard of Yahoo's Pipes.

Its an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. List of 'hot pipes' to subscribe to, and ability to create your own (yahoo account required).

I played with it during beta back in the day, however I had a blast. Its really fun and easy to aggregate different feeds and you can add logic or filters to the "pipes". You can even do more then just RSS like import images from flickr.

Answer 3

Here is an article on Merge Multiple RSS Feeds Into One with Yahoo! Pipes + FeedBurner. Another option is Feed Rinse, but they have a paid version as well as the free version.

Additionally: I have heard good things about AideRss

Answer 4

SimplePie is a PHP library that supports merging RSS feeds into one combined feed. I don't believe it does dupe checking out-of-the-box, but I found it trivial to write a little function to eliminate duplicate content via their GUIDs.

Answer 5

In the latest Podcast, Jeff and Joel talked about the RSS feeds for tags, and Joel noted that there is only the current ability to do AND on tags, not OR.

Jeff suggested that this would be included at some stage in the future.

I think that you should request this on uservoice, or vote for it if it is already there.

Answer 6

I create a the stackoverflow tag feeds pipe. You can list your tags of choice into the text box and it will combine them into a single feed with all the unique posts. It escapes '#' and '+' characters for you.

Alternatively, you can use the pipe's rss feed by appending your html-encoded tags separated by '+'s:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=uP22vN923RG_c71O1ZzWFw&_render=rss&tags=.net+c%23+powershell

Unfortunatley, though, this seems to strip out the content of the posts. The content is visible in the debug view, but the output only contains the post title.

[Thanks to everyone for suggesting Yahoo Pipes! Had heard of it before, but never tried it until now :-]