Optimizing RSS Feeds With Yahoo Pipes

I am someone who likes to think of less is more and when it comes to RSS feeds I try to limit how many feeds I have listed in my Google Reader account and thought it would be best to look at a solution to combine two of my personal feeds which will make it easier for people to stay up-to-date with my blogs.

Currently my two personal blogs are this one, Tyler Ingram dot Com and of course my photography blog Tyler Ingram Photos dot Com. To try and keep it more interesting for people to subscribe to one RSS Feed as opposed to two separate feeds I looked to Twitter for a suggestion. Duane Storey suggested I look at using Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is a way to mash up your popular feeds into one big feed but for me I find that it allows me to combine my two feeds into one which also gives the end user a more frequent update.

The interface for Yahoo Pipes reminds me a lot of say MS Viso. A easy to use, drag-n-drop environment where you can attach elements to each other with a click of a mouse. I am sure it can get a lot more complicated with that but for me all I needed to do was:

• Drag over a Fetch Feeds module
• Enter the two feeds
• Drag over Unique and set it to ‘title’ this ensures no duplicate entries, just in case
• Drag over a Sort and sort by Date Published
• Link the two modules up and then link the module to the page output.

That is pretty simple. I could see doing this for similar feeds with a particular niche which might make it easier to keep your information up-to-date.

I then just copied the RSS feed URL from Yahoo Pipes into Feedburner to replace my main feed and viola! Now I have 1 feed for 2 websites which no one needs to do anything but just sit back and read my blog posts.

Pretty simple right?

If you are not subscribed to my RSS Feed then you can do so easily by clicking on this link. This allows you to keep up to date with this blog as well as my photography blog and elminates the need to be subscribe to two separate feeds.