How do I consolidate entries from multiple employee blogs into a single RSS feed

Question

Our current SharePoint environment has Mysites setup as separate site collections where users create their blogs. It is a real challenge to know these blogs indivdually and I usually grab the RSS feed the first time I visit and then susbcribe from within Outlook. To help out non-techies, we'd like to be able to consolidate the entries from some top (regular) bloggers on our portal into a single feed that can then be used to subscribe from Outlook or display on a page on the portal.

Any ideas on how to go about this would be much appreciated. Thank you for your time and have a great day.

Answer 1

**Edit - this will not work if your feeds are not publicly available.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

About Pipes

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

* combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
* geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive

map. * power widgets/badges on your web site. * grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

Answer 2

I'm no fan of PHP and obviously you are using some MS products but here is a PHP script that does it.

http://www.feedforall.com/rssmesh.htm

Perhaps you can use this as a basis for an asp/ asp.net page that will do it for you.

Answer 3

You will need to release a file to your _layouts directory, coding it to spit an RSS feed to the user. Maybe use a query string to decide which RSS feeds to read from.

Maybe start with Eric Shupp's webpart and progress from there.

Answer 4

If you're into open-source self-hosted stuff you can try python-based webapp called Planet. It has RSS and html output (with template support).

Answer 5

I would consolidate these top feeds into an OPML file. Here's a great example. Outlook 2007 can parse this and add it as a a collection of feeds.

You could also write a quick web part to parse the OPML file and download the top n posts from each feed. Sahil Malik has already done this hard work and you could use his examples as a jump off.

Answer 6

Take a look at our solution here: Anatomy of an Employee Blogging Solution

I talk about just how we achieved it. We are also very close to releasing this as a solution, so feel free to drop me an email ([email protected]) if you are interested. Or try our demo: http://demo.zevenseas.com