Combining or sorting RSS feeds

Lately, we've been getting some requests on RSS related stuff - maybe there are people who want to combine different types of Ning feeds into one giant RSS feed that they can tell their friends or post to My Yahoo! or a FeedReader. There are other users who want to integrate their RSS or Podcast into the RSS Widget on their Ning networks, but find out that they get the first couple of entries instead of the latest content.

Enter Yahoo! Pipes. Yahoo! Pipes is basically "a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web," but it's also a fancy way of saying "it lets you do stuff with RSS feeds."

And boy, does it.

If there are people out there that really want to get their hands dirty with RSS and feed manipulation, check out Yahoo! Pipes and try playing around with UI. But for everyone else that just want to combine a bunch of RSS feeds into one, or sort their podcast RSS into chronological order, you can check out our Pipes, enter your own RSS feed(s), and use the RSS feeds that are spit out to your network or other places on the web.

And like always, let me know if you have any comments or questions!
- Ernie

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by mike whybark on May 4, 2008 at 12:22pm

Ernie, your Y! Pipes link goes to a Ning Advocates page that does not have any pipes displayed. Oversight?

Regarding RSS and Ning sources in general, is there a pre-rolled way to present a true "All activity" page-slash-feed? Our users are screaming about not being able to keep up with site updates, and the default 20 items in Latest Activity ain't cutting it for 'em.

Thanks!

Permalink Reply by Ernie H. on May 4, 2008 at 12:41pm

Hi Mike, try the link now: It should work properly.

Permalink Reply by mike whybark on May 5, 2008 at 8:27am

yep, i see 'em now. I thought it might be a published/not published thing.

Permalink Reply by Francisco on July 5, 2008 at 11:14am

I copied the pipes embed code in a new page on my site and gave me an error message...

Uh-oh!
Sorry! This app has encountered a serious problem and can't continue. The problem has been noted for the developer to fix.

Trace:
#0 /php/includes/XN/WWF/lib/NF_Controller.php(119): NF::bailOut('Sorry! This app...', NULL)
#1 [internal function]: NF_Controller->action_error('Sorry! This app...')
#2 /php/includes/XN/WWF/lib/NF_Controller.php(795): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)
#3 /php/includes/XN/WWF/lib/NF_Controller.php(169): NF_Controller->_invokeAction('error', Array)
#4 /php/includes/XN/WWF/lib/W_Controller.php(66): NF_Controller->action(Object(NF_ArgWrapper))
#5 /php/includes/XN/WWF/lib/W_Widget.php(494): W_Controller->action('error', 'Sorry! This app...')
#6 /apps/socialnetworkmain/lib/XG_App.php(1398): W_Widget->dispatch('page', 'update')
#7 [internal function]: XG_App::dispatchRequest(NULL)
#8 /php/includes/XN/WWF/lib/W_WidgetApp.php(129): call_user_func(Array, NULL)
#9 /apps/socialnetworkmain/lib/index.php(28): W_WidgetApp::go()
#10 /apps/aguilasdecorazon/index.php(3): require_once('/apps/socialnet...')
#11 {main}

Permalink Reply by Francisco on July 5, 2008 at 11:38am

this is the script i pasted

Permalink Reply by Ben Lavell on August 18, 2008 at 4:01am

I'm using one of your yahoo pipes templates to combine rss feeds into one news source. They work great, however, when I click 'more' I am taken to the Yahoo pipes page, rather than a list of news stories. Is there anything that can be done about this?

Permalink Reply by TimG on August 21, 2008 at 7:33am

I don't believe so, Ben. Although I dislike the "More..." behavior you mention, it appears that Ning programmed their RSS box to append a "More..." link that points to the original RSS source (e.g. http://pipes.yahoo.com/).

Sure, it'd be nice if Ning could make the RSS box more versatile, such as allowing you to preset the "More..." link's destination URL. This way, you could point to an on-network page that's loaded with ALL your activity items.

But Ning keeps things (understandably simple), and I don't see this changing any time soon.

Post again if you come up with a work-around.

Lovin' the Pipes!

- TimG

Permalink Reply by Ernie H. on August 21, 2008 at 1:52pm

Hi Ben, TimG is correct. Since nothing can really be edited from an RSS feed level, your best bet is to probably use a Javascript hack to find the DOM element of the RSS button and then manually change that to the URL of your RSS feed source. It's a bit of a hack but it'll do the job.

Thanks, Ernie

Permalink Reply by partha on October 8, 2008 at 1:10pm

Hey, we have a combined RSS feed, that we created using Yahoopipes but whenever we try to add that it shows an error. It says 'A problem occurred retrieving this RSS feed'. What could be the problem? This feed is working in other sites.

Partha

Permalink Reply by Dylan Roberts on October 28, 2008 at 11:48am

Hey Ernie!!

I have been using pipes for the activity feed. I would like to use pipes to get updates from all of the feeds on my ning network (www.naofp.org). I have been unable to locate the actual URL's for the feed (forum etc..) Where are they?

Thanks!!

Permalink Reply by TimG on October 28, 2008 at 11:54am

The format I've been using (successfully) is:
http://[yournetworkhere].ning.com/activity/log/list?fmt=rss

Note to others: GoogleGroups - especially Invite-Only groups - routinely block external access, particularly by Yahoo! Pipes, so if you are unable to obtain RSS items from a Google Group, that may be the explanation.