Aggregating multiple RSS feeds into a single feed

Are there any plugins or complementary tools that can be used to aggregate rss feeds from multiple sites on the web into a single feed that can be displayed using the RSS feed or other widget? I've done a couple searches and haven't been able to find anything.

  • Not that I'm aware of, shouldn't be terribly hard to do though.

    http://simplepie.org/

  • why not take an existing rss feed reader plugin ~ re-work the logic to collect all the different feeds specified by admin ~ into one block before final display ?

  • Thanks! Looks like "multifeeds" are possible with SimplePie but I have no idea how to implement it as an Elgg plugin. I'm not a programmer (have tried but my brain no work that way). The way that envision it working is to copy the RSS feed plugin and add a button that allows the addition of more URL boxes for more feeds, along with linked boxes to add a source/author name to preceed the titles of the feed items. This info would then be used to implement the multifeed modification to the script.

    Now that I now the jargon "multifeed", I easily found several tools that allow a single rss URL to be generated from multiple feeds, which is great as long as those tools persist indefinitely, which looks to not be very common...

    Unfortunately, I haven't found a tool yet that also provides the source/author of the feed items or allows a custom source/author name to be tagged to the feed items. Results of implementing a multifeed in the RSS feed widget is a combined list of feed titles with no info about the sources, which is very important to me and my community. With the RSS feed widget, that information is contained in the widget title. I don't think the RSS feed widget could provide the information about the item sources even if it was available in the feed. Correct?

    Any ideas about adding a source/author name to the items in the multifeed? Is that even possible?

  • Feed reader plugins are already available in the community.

  • Yes, but not multifeed reader plugins.

  • Last night I spent several hours figuring out how to mashup a bunch of Yahoo Pipes modules to create the multifeed with titles prefixed by a custom label for each source. It is not a pretty process and I wouldn't expect any of my group admins to use this hack to create their own. It is way too difficult a process to describe in a way that the average Joe would understand or care to go through. It's also only good as long as Yahoo Pipies is supported. This seems so weird, because I've found many posts in other forums by people looking for this same functionality. There are a couple solutions for different engines, but outside those engines, Yahoo Pipes is the only way I've found to build a multifeed with source labels.

    PM me if you want to see the Pipe I built. It is hardcoded for a labeled multifeed I wanted, which was the only way I could figure out how to build it. Maybe the Pipe could be helpful for someone wanting to develop an Elgg plugin with this functionality.

  • I've placed a RSS Multi-Feed Reader between my TopBar and Header DIV's. It's hidden by default and slides in by clicking an icon in the TopBar. It has audio alerts for UpDates and displays 7 different feeds OK on a 1080p display and displays many more (limitless) by horizontal scroll-bar. I';m woirking on a plugin for the community.

  • Here is the link to the pipe I built. It can be cloned to create other multifeeds tagged by a custom source label.  http://pipes.yahoo.com/lccnewspipe/selccnews

    If sources provide an rss feed URL, then it is pretty easy to now create a multifeed of those sources. If the sources embed the feed in their pages and do not provide the URL to the feed, then the feed must be fetched from the page, which requires an additional pipe to be created to generate the feed and then use the URL of that pipe to feed the pipe above.

    Here are the steps:

    1. Read or fetch each rss feed individually and add a custom label
    2. Union the feeds into a multifeed
    3. Remove duplicate titles from the multifeed
    4. Sort the items in descending order by date
    5. Generate the multifeed URL
    6. Fetch* the multifeed using the RSS feed widget.

    *The RSS feed URL provided by Yahoo Pipes does not seem to work in the Elgg RSS feed widget. However the page URL generated by Yahoo Pipes that reads the feed will work. The Elgg rss feed widget fetches the read from the page.

    It would be great if someone could develop an RSS multifeed widget plugin that does this instead of having to go through Yahoo Pipes... :)

  • @DDS... Thanks for the offer of help. I may take you up on it. Just let me get it to the best of my ability then I'll let you maul it before putting it to the Community. I have it working on a beta-test site but it's part of my theme and I want to seperate it and have it as a TopBar plugin.