Jeff Sandstrom’s Blog

RSS Feed Management

Jan 30

JeffTech Pipes, rss, synchronize, Yahoo 1 Comment

I’m an RSS junkie. Ever since I learned about them on an episode of NPR’s Future Tense back in 2004, RSS feeds have been my pri­mary method for con­sum­ing news and blog con­tent. Over time, I built up a sub­stan­tial list of feeds across a vari­ety of topics that I wanted to access no matter what device I was using, be it my home PC, my work laptop, my smart­phone, etc. Of course the frus­tra­tion came when I had no way to easily syn­chro­nize my feeds across the devices.

Enter Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo what? Pipes. Yahoo Pipes. Never heard of it? I’m sure you’re not alone. It hasn’t exactly gar­nered a lot of press. From the Pipes Overview page:

[Yahoo] Pipes is a free online ser­vice that lets you remix pop­u­lar feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or pub­lish and share your own web ser­vices with­out ever having to write a line of code.

Yeah, I know - I hate the word “mashup,” too. But this is actu­ally useful.

I use Pipes to con­sol­i­date RSS feeds by topic. Exam­ple: my Typog­ra­phy News pipe includes eight dif­fer­ent RSS feeds from typography-​related blogs. All feed items are then sorted by date and de-​duped based on item title.

Once saved, Yahoo Pipes pro­duces a single RSS feed for the entire pipe, which I can then add to my laptop, my desk­top PC and my smart­phone. Now when I run across a new typog­ra­phy blog, instead of adding the RSS feed to each of my devices, I can simply add it to my Typog­ra­phy News pipe and access the con­tent no matter which device I’m using.

If you’re strug­gling with RSS feed over­load, give Yahoo Pipes a try. It’s free, easy and useful (and don’t worry, Yahoo is not pulling a Belkin and paying me to write this).