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.

Twitter has been the topic du jour recently especially after the recent antics (Aston Kutcher vs CNN) and star power ( Celebrity Tweeters Give Twitter a Huge Boost) driving even more attention to it. A lot of people have been asking me what all the interest is about and I’ve been a bit pressed to come up with an explanation that captures the essence of Twitter in a way that appeals to everyone. In doing my normal rounds I came across a pretty powerful video that does a more effective job of explaining what I was trying to. In this TED talk, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams reveals that many of the ideas driving their skyrocketing growth came from unexpected uses invented by the users themselves. This video captures a few of the reasons why Twitter is so powerful.

As I alluded to in a previous post: Managing (and Reading) Your Feeds, I am on a personal mission to tame the continuous, but absolutely essential, inflow of information that I am facing on a daily basis. One of those inbound channels is my large (and growing) list of feeds that supply me with a continuous stream of information, insight and inspiration. Left unchecked for any period of time, my feeds can actually inhibit, not increase, my daily productivity and I am sure I am not the only person.

Previously I recommended ReadAir – which I still really like – for accessing your GReader feeds but my googling yielded another interesting, and relatively new, application to the mix.

ShareFire (formerly known as Apprise) is the brainchild of Adobe AIR development team members Christian Cantrell and Dan Koestler, and is a really slick news aggregator written for Adobe AIR. ShareFire has several useful features, but what really differentiates it is the ability to share news stories with friends over various social networks right from the application. It currently supports sharing via email, AIM, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, MySpace, and Newsvine. It’s not a perfect connector (which is what I had been originally looking for) to GReader – it does not sync up with it like ReadAir does – but you can easily import and export OPML files that you have generated from other feed-based utilities (like Google Reader). Take a look at the screencast below for a brief demo of what the app is capable of.

A few of the other features that I really like are the fact that it is completely cross-platform (Windows and Mac, Linux support is still in development), it includes a keyword-based notification system (which they call Smart Topics), it allows you to arrange posts by topic, switch views between RSS and live web, and supports over a dozen foreign languages!

As with most cool new applications (web or otherwise) it is still considered in “Beta” so there are some minor bugs. However, with that said, the application is Open Source and all of the source code for ShareFire as well as all the libraries it uses is available on Google Code. So if you do find something you’d like to add or improve upon and you are so inclined you can make a contribution to the source code.

Despite the fact that it didn’t solve my problems of effectively managing my Google Reader account like ReadAir does, it does do a lot of other things exceptionally well, not least of which is sharing. Based on my short-term use, I am really impressed with it and highly recommend checking it out, especially if you are looking for a more effective tool to manage your feeds without being connected through a browser.