Once you’re writing and/or managing a bunch of sites or blogs, you may find that it would be useful to mash all your feeds together into one feed that displays posts from all of your sites in chronological order. For example, you may want to have each site display all the new posts from your other sites. Or, as in my case, I wanted to easily have all my new posts appear as Notes in facebook (yes, we’re back to facebook again).
Previously, I reviewed the different ways you can integrate your WordPress blog with facebook and vice versa. There are plugins that allow you to display every site in its own “box” on facebook, but that has a few disadvantages, namely it clutters your facebook profile, your “friends” may not receive notifications of any updates to those boxes (I’m not sure about this), and it means installing yet more plugins.
I explained how to get facebook Notes to display an RSS feed, but the disadvantage there is that you are limited to one feed. So I decided I would try to “mash” up all my feeds and create one monster feed that would create a new Note with every new post.
My criteria for a RSS feed mashing service were as follows:
- free (of course)
- pretty easy
- good results
Isn’t that what we’re always looking for?
Anyways, I did a quick search and tried out two services that met my criteria: KickRSS, and RSS Mixer. Here are the results:
| KickRSS | RSS Mixer | |
| Site design | Really nerdy ala 1995 | Really web 2.0 cool with gradients and all |
| Favicon | Yes | No! |
| Need to login? | Yes | No |
| Easy to add feeds | Yes – but a little sticky. Each feed was only recognized on the second try | Yes |
| Good results? | Yes | Yes |
| Extra options | Code snippet that you can embed in your site to enable searches of your new feed. That could be really coolCan order the feed by Date/time of article, or Date article was retrieved
Can import and export OPML feeds |
New feed can easily be used as Apple Dashboard Widget, iPhone version, a Web Widget that you can embed in a site (I didn’t test how it looks, but you could embed an RSS feed in your site with the right plugins too – we’ll get to that in a future post), or regular RSS feed. |
Disadvantages to these mixed feeds:
- Can’t brand them with your own logos or colors.
- Can’t track the number of subscribers with FeedBurner since you can’t burn or redirect these feeds (at least not easily).
- It’s not a full-text feed – only excerpts.
- All images, videos, etc. – anything that is not pure text – is stripped.
You may ask – why didn’t you use sleek and simple Yahoo Pipes? Well, I ain’t no tech-dummy, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where to put what and how to put it in Yahoo Pipes. Pipes is simple for nuclear physicists and Linux users, and I am neither.
I tried importing both feeds in facebook, and the results were the same so I decided to go with KickRSS for no good reason whatsoever. If it stops working, I’ll let you know, but in the meantime, all my facebook friends can now enjoy every single new post added to all of my sites – lucky them!
