While I normally keep my posts a little less technical I decided to jump into the technical realm based on a number of questions that I have seen on Twitter and particularly due to a request for help from a friend.

Many pundits have proclaimed that RSS is dead but I firmly disagree. I think RSS is still one of the easiest and most flexible medium to get information how you want it when you want it. However, with everything information related there is always the challenge of managing the barrage of information that everyone of us is dealing with every single day.

The purpose of this post is to illustrate an easy way to merge multiple site feeds into a single source to make it a little easier to manage and maintain. One perfectly good reason to do this is if you are an association who offers multiple/many individual feeds from your site and would like to offer your members a consolidated feed – but the utility doesn’t end there. It’s really only limited by your own need/imagination.

Let’s get started.

For the purposes of this brief tutorial we are going to use Yahoo Pipes largely because I believe it is the most flexible and easiest to use of all of the similar services available. If you have a Yahoo! (think Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, etc.) account it is really easy to get started. If not, the first step is to sign-up.

Once you are signed-in, click on the “Create A Pipe” link in the top menu bar:

You will then see the following screen which is the Yahoo! Pipes main stage where you can work your magic:

While the myriad options can be overwhelming, we are going to keep things simple and get right to the task at hand. We’re only going to be scratching the surface of what is really possible with Yahoo! Pipes so if you are really curious I’d encourage you to check things out in greater detail at some point in the future.

Our first task is going to be to add a few modules to the main stage. The first one we are going to add is the “Fetch Feed”. To do this you will have to expand the “Sources” menu on the right side of the screen and then “drag-and-drop” the module on the stage.

Above you can see that I have added three “Fetch Site Feed” modules to the stage. This is because I am going to be merging feeds from three sites into one. Once you have the modules on the stage, simply enter the URL’s from the sites that you want to merge. Because we are using the “Fetch Site Feed” module, not the “Fetch Feed” module, all that you have to do is enter the URL of the site(s) that you want to merge. However, the process would be the same if you knew the URL’s of the feeds and used the “Fetch Feed” module instead.

It would be tempting to simply try and merge the feeds together straight away, but we are going to hold off on that for a moment and add a few other modules that provide us with more control of the output. If you look at the navigation pane on the left you will see an option labeled “Operators”, you will want to expand that to gain access to the next two modules that you are going to want to add to your stage.

Click on the “Operators” option and that will reveal a new set of modules.

As I alluded to earlier, you can see that you have a bunch of options. For those of you with less of a technical orientation some of the options may sound like they are in a different language, while others may appear to be much more intuitive. Fear not. We are only interested in two of them for the next few steps: “Truncate” and “Union”

The “Truncate” module allows you to control the number of feed items that you will “fetch” from the feeds that you are merging. The “Union” module is where the true magic of this tutorial takes place and what is responsible for the “merging”.

Using the drag-and-drop method we used previously, you are going to want to add the “Truncate” module to your stage.

You should add as many of these modules as you have “Fetch Site Feed” modules. For the purposes of this tutorial you will see that I have added 3.

Once those modules are on your stage, you can fill-in the amount of items. I have chosen to use 10 from each feed.

The next step is to add-in the additional module from the list in the left pane that I referenced above: “Union”. Again, simply drag-and-drop this module to your stage. Once it is added, your stage should look similar to what I have below:

Take a deep breath! You are almost done. There are only a few more steps left to complete. You have all of the components on the stage that you need to merge your feeds into one. Now all you have to do is “Pipe” them together. To do that all you need to do is literally “connect the dots”. Simply place your cursor over the circle/bubble at the bottom of the module and you will see that cursor transforms into a hand. Drag the mouse to the top of the module below it. It sounds more complicated than it is, so just give it a shot. Below is an image of the modules on the stage, piped together.

Once you have everything “piped” together you will want to save your Pipe. To do this simply click on the “Save” button located on the top-right portion of the screen.

Doing this will enable you to “Run” your pipe and generate the output – which in this case is your merged feeds. All you have to do to “Run” the pipe is click on the “Run Pipe” link that will appear at the top-center of the screen if your pipe saved properly.

This will open a new tab/window and you will be presented with the results of your merged feed. Mine looks like this:

At this point all that is left to do is get the URL for the newly created RSS feed. You can see that you have plenty of options. However, if you are planning on offering it as a link on your site the most obvious choice is RSS.

Here is a link to the Pipe that I created for this tutorial: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=EsPef6lq3hGOG39MKX1_0w. You can take a look at it to see everything in completed form and also can clone it if you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating your own merged feed from scratch.

I hope it helps. Let me know if you have any questions or run into any problems in the comments below.