Podcasters' Emporium

The other day I was looking for a way to consolidate the many feeds I have over at the Lifestyle PodNetwork so that I could present each show in the chronological order it was published in one feed.

I found one way to do it through a beta service Yahoo! provides called Yahoo! Pipes. This service provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for building applications (pipes) that aggregate (consolidate) web feeds, web pages and other service.

What I’m going to show you in this podcast is a really simple way to create a pipe to consolidate several feeds into one feed, sorted in decending publication date order.

Here are the steps:

1) Create a Yahoo! account (if required) and login to Yahoo! Pipes at http://pipes.yahoo.com/

2) Click Create A Pipe

3) Expand the Sources label, and drag Fetch Feed module onto your workspace

Hint: look for the gridded section with the text drag modules here

4) Add your fully formed feed URLS to the Fetch feed section

5) Click +URL to add additional feeds, continue to do this until all feeds are entered.

6) Expand the Operators label, and drag the Sort module onto your workspace

7) Modify the settings to sort by item.pubDate in decending order

This will take all the feeds, parse them and display the output according to the date they were published. In plain english: show me all the blog posts in the date they were posted.

8) On your workspace, link the Fetch Feed module to the Sort module, by drawing a line from the Output spot on Fetch feed to the Input spot on the Sort module.

9) Link the Sort module to the Pipe Output module

10) Click Save

Your completed pipe shoud look something like this:

11) Publish your pipe

12) Take your new Yahoo! Pipe and use Feedburner to make it an easier address, and to get your statistics.

And Voila! Multiple feeds combined using Yahoo! Pipes.