While i was working on my RSS cookbook article, I tried out a dozen different RSS mixers - applications that let you combine several RSS feeds into one. Now, technically you need only one such service, but believe it or not, there are some substantial differences between them. Here are five RSS mixers that I think are worth trying out.
Out of all the RSS Mixers I’ve found, Feedblendr deserves the credit for being the most simple. There’s no registration, and it only has one step: enter the title and your RSS feeds (*you can have more than 3, click on Add More Feeds), click on Blend your feed, and that’s it. The obvious downside is, of course, the absence of any advanced options, but if you need to do some quick RSS blending/mixing, this is what you need. Also, have in mind that not all feeds (and feed mixes) are created equal. Some of these apps have trouble chewing up some feeds. I’ve noticed that a combination of Megite, Tailrank and Techmeme creates problems for many, but Feedblendr passed this test with flying colors, plus it was also the fastest of the bunch.
Blogsieve offers by far the greatest number of options. You can blend up to 5 feeds, and perform a number of actions on your mix, which include filtering (string match, string length, link density, html density), sorting (alphabetical/reverse alphabetical sort or date/reverse date sort) and stripping (HTML tags and styles, javascript tags and tracking URLs). It has one huge drawback, though - it doesn’t work. It requires you to enter your email to finish the blend, but the confirmation email never comes. However, the site doesn’t look deserted so it might be just a temporary glitch, and because of its abundance of options I’ve decided to mention it anyway.
Feedcombine
Feedcombine offers you to blend feeds from a list of predefined sources, which is solid but not big enough for most users. It displays the feed mix in its page which is pretty well designed and can be used as a simple RSS reader. It also has some interesting options; for example, you can choose to idenfity the feeds with their title at the beginning of each feed’s description.
Unfortunately, when I’ve tried mixing my own feeds, which is also an option (again, I tried out the Tailrank - Megite - Techmeme combination), Feedcombine was often unable to chew them and reported an error. The authors should really work on their feed parsing, because otherwise the service is pretty good. Here’s a feed that combines news from Digg, Slashdot and Wired.
Feedshake won’t win any design awards, but it works well and it offers the possibility to filter the feeds by keywords. Its filtering options aren’t advanced as those of Blogsieve, but if you don’t need them Feedshake will do fine. It blends the feeds in a single step, and it gives you the possibility to manage your feeds after you’ve created them. I’ve had problems mixing Megite, Tailrank and Techmeme, but it worked for the last two. Here’s a sample feed: http://feedshake.com/mpfeeds/wits4u8qpv.xml
Definitely the most ambitious product in this bunch, xFruits has by far the best design and offers an entire package of mini-applications (at xFruits they call them “bricks”), each with one simple purpose. You can blend several feeds into one, convert RSS to HTML, PDF or mobile device friendly format, send RSS to an email address or create an RSS feeds from all the emails you receive in your mailbox. That’s a really interesting list, as several of these services aren’t - to my knowledge - available anywhere else. Two more features aren’t available yet but are present on the site, File to RSS and Composer.
After you register at xFruits you will receive your profile page (at www.xfruits.com/yourusername) where you can see all of your RSS blends in one place. You can edit or delete your xFruits (feed blends) here, make them public or private and even see how many people clicked on them. I’m not yet sure what I’m going to do with all these options but xFruits is a Swiss army knife type of application: they give you the possibilities, it’s up to you to use them. It’s still not theperfect RSS mixer, because it lacks some of the advanced options for feed blending which some of the competitors have. However, they’re definitely ahead of the pack. *as a quick example of what xFruits can do, here’s a link to a PDF version of the latest posts from franticindustries.
Stan,
Another excellent post. Bookmarked.
If you want to make a serious job of feed mixing, then go and have a look at the excellent service the people from mySyndicaat http://www.mysyndicaat.com are offering. Their free service is capable of processing hosted OPML files, which means that changes you make to the list of feeds that you are combining will immediately be reflected in the masterfeed. After being loyal to its closest competitor FeedDigest http://www.feeddigest.com for a long time, I now use mySyndicaat exclusively to create several River of News feeds.
My public RSS mixing projects are
- RSSonate, a collection of 40 technology blogs that focus on RSS technology. It is on display in the sidebar of my blog CleverClogs (http://www.cleverclogs.org) using a Grazr widget.
- RSS Tool Vendor News, a list of blogs and news feeds from over 200 vendors in the RSS industry. This list too is on display using Grazr, on a blog of its own: http://dutchisms.typepad.com/rss_tool_vendors
I maintain my feed lists using BlogBridge http://www.blogbridge.com. As far as I know it’s the only RSS aggregator that allows you to create and subscribe to dynamic feed reading lists.
Yes, I’m a tidbit fanatic about RSS technology
@Marjlolein: thank you for your suggestions, I’ll make sure to check out the services you mentioned.
Good post, reminds me why I need to spend more time reading your feed
I personally like http://FeedRinse.com a lot, it combines and filters and works quite well. Scraping, RSS to javascript/php to HTML and RSS to IM alerts are all things that for now seem to be done best with seperate apps, imho. FeedDigest does almost everything, and really well, but hasn’t accepted new accounts in a long time.
Very good article but you forget Blastfeed.com which is in private beta. I wrote two articles about BlastFeed but they are in French, sorry
I am partial to RSSmesh - http://www.feedforall.com/rssmesh.htm it works with other PHP scripts I use.
The problem with Blogsieve seems to persist. If you fill out your e-mail address to activate the feed, you always get an error message saying you need to fill out your e-mail address… ad infinitum.
Thanks for the links. I have been looking for these services for a while now. xFruits looks promising indeed. But I prefer to use Marjolein her suggestion, mySyndicaat. I just set up a test case and it works fine. The only thing left to do is to find how I can style the page.
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Great post. A new mixer to add, you might want to try:
http://www.rssmixer.com
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Hi all,
I would like to suggest another web based RSS tool, which is a feed directory and easy-to-use RSS mixer / RSS merger with filter features :
Swiv RSS mixer
Many thanks for this list.
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