Wednesday 30 October 2013

Multi Blog RSS aggregator - help requested

Once upon a time, there were sites that did a good job of mixing the various eve blogs and combining them into an easily consumable view.   That was then, and this is now.

TL;DR:

What easy to maintain method can I use to create, maintain, and distribute a consolidated Eve Blogroll, across multiple platforms?

Research and suggestions are welcome, but what I am really after is hosts and processes that people have direct, recent experience with.

Test feeds are available at :


http://rssmix.com/u/3827027/rss.xml (nearly looks readable directly in firefox and chrome) and
http://rssmix.com/u/3827027/rss.json


The existing resources

There are a few initiatives out there to try to rebuild this.  In my not so humble opinion, I have one of the better (bigger?) meta lists that have current posts viewable in a browser at http://foo-blogroll.blogspot.com.au/

Sugar Kyle has possibly the best (biggest?) master list of eve websites at https://sites.google.com/site/newedensource/ ; followed closely by the OPML list at http://cognitiveindustries.com/opml/index.php

I use feedly to consume my own reading list feeds.

The Whine

Both my list and Sugar's lists suffer from being somewhat manual and painful to maintain.

The cognitive industries site suffers from not having a web or phone browser wrapper around it.  I know how to import an OPML list into some RSS programs, but not very well,  I consider myself  technically competant.  Syncing additions is even harder.

I can't work out how to synchronise my feedly reading list with the published blogroll.  (Yes there is manual processes, but it works so

I find it hard to read my own master blogroll site from my mobile phone.  I believe others would consider it unusable (with some justification).

Restrictions

I want to leach off free solutions; that are not advertising based.
  • Free means that I am not reaching into my own pockets, and that I can leave a solution running even once I move onto a new project.  I am not planning on going anywhere; but realistically some form of what happens when I move onto a new game needs to be considered.
  • Not advertising based means less work for me blocking undesirable adverts.
I would prefer a simple to set up solution. There are already enough days that I would rather play eve rather than blog about it.  I am not looking for a 3 month job to set up a cloud hosted app.

I don't want to use a home server; my internet connection is neither fast nor reliable enough.

I don't like what the outcome I have with Yahoo pipes; I could not get it to sort in date time correctly. 

http://www.feedcombine.com did not let me create an account.

A possible solution

What I want is a feed consolidator; something that I can easily add and remove sites from, but give users an easy to use and consistent RSS feed to consume. I am prepared to pay a small amount out of pocket for this; but would prefer free

I would then replace my existing blogroll contents and feedly subscription to both point at the same list.  I would also make this feed available for other RSS users to read on their travel time / lunch breaks on their phones/tablets.

But the devil is in the detail.

The best I have come up with so far is http://rssmix.com/

It looks like I can consolidate the 70 or so feeds that I currently consume into a single feed and get what I want to read (and have read) in one spot.  The trick is that, while I can create a new list easily enough, modifying an existing list seems tricky.

I might get away with two layers of technology; one using rssmix.com to build new feeds quickly and easily, and a 'wrapper' feed that gives a consistent end point but takes the rssmix.com.

I have no idea about the people behind rssmix.com; where to get support, how long they plan to be around under their current guise.

So I leave up nearly where I started.

Is rssmix.com the best tool for what I am looking to build?  Has someone else already built it, and I am missing something?  Surely what I am trying to do has already been done.

I threw together an RSS mix based on the current cogntive industries OPML file; and it give us

http://rssmix.com/u/3827027/rss.xml
and
http://rssmix.com/u/3827027/rss.json

I have no idea if this feed process is going to work, or if this is the right tool; but bash it around a little.


2 comments:

  1. Aye. I need to find something similar. Gonna do updates to new eden source this weekend with adding making some inactive and a bit of news

    ReplyDelete
  2. blogeve.com though it can be slow due to the large amount of feeds that it has to occasionally pull.

    ReplyDelete

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