simple tool for doing stuff with rss feeds

Many people are starting to create cool things by aggregating RSS [what?] feeds, applying rules to them, then outputting the content in useful ways. My favourite two examples of this are the Best of the Journalism Blogs meta-feed created by Journalism.co.uk and the the exceptionally useful Chipwrapper, a UK headline search tool with RSS at it’s heart.

A few months back I tried to use Yahoo Pipes to make something of my own but, despite an excellent step-by-step how-to provided, again, by Journalism.co.uk, I just couldn’t crack it. Now, thanks to a twitter update by Paul Bradshaw, I’ve discovered xFruits, a tool he’s using to aggregate the RSS feeds of his Journalism Students.

xFruits appears to do all sorts of clever things with RSS feeds including not just aggregation but also taking email and turning it into RSS, outputting RSS in mobile friendly and other formats, etc. I decided to give it a go.

For the past year or so I’ve been authoring a blog about St. Albans, the small city just outside of London in which I live. Most of the posts are written on my mobile phone after I take a photo of a local market, new shop, or whatever I’ve ordered to eat in a local restaurant. The blog has become a hub for people seeking out local information and reviews, in part because I’ve added links to a wide range of local websites, ranging from the County and City information portals to the local newspapers. I also have a growing list of links to local blogs and automatically pull in pictures tagged with St. Albans on flickr.

I’d like to do more linking to other local blogs, but with over 15 of them, it’s difficult to keep up something that, in part, could be solved with RSS feed aggregation.

The first step of using xFruits to achieve this is to name your feed and give it descriptive tags so that other users can find in.

The second step is to tell xFruits what to aggregate which you can do either by uploading an OPML file or by inputting each feed by hand. I chose the latter since this is how most people without a technical background are likely to do it. Thankfully, xFruits makes it dead easy – I didn’t even need to look up the feed addresses, I simply input the site URLs and xFruits found them for me.

Considering it only took five minutes to do, and required little technical knowledge beyond a vague idea of what an RSS feed is, I’m fairly pleased with the results, which you can preview in bloglines.

I realise that xFruits probably can’t do some of the more clever things achievable using more powerful services such as Yahoo Pipes, for example not just aggregating feeds but then applying a set of rules to them before outputting the results, but xFruits a good introduction to creating useful things with RSS feeds for people who want to do it but don’t necessarily know how.