Darren Ferguson - Weblog

08 June 2008

RSS feed aggregation using Yahoo pipes

Filed under: Umbraco, Work - by Darren Ferguson @ 22:25

I’ve been digesting some of the information on day two of codegarden and in particular this post that contains a list of ‘most wanted’ packages.

I’m unsure who requested RSS feed aggregation but before anyone were to dive in and start coding it may be worth having a look at Yahoo pipes.

As yahoo say:

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

I’ve been using pipes for some time to consolidate all of the Umbraco related feeds into a single feed. Here is a shot of the GUI when editing my pipe.

Once you have a pipe created it can be used to syndicate the output in a number of formats.

It should be a relatively simple task to read an cache your pipe RSS output to your Umbraco web server, possibly using some kind of Macro, but I’d recommend using a scheduled task and simply writing the feed to the file system as pipes with multiple feeds may impair your page load time – if for example one of the feed sources is unavailable for any reason.

If anyone would like some help with this package, please let me know.