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Mashing up RSS feeds with Textpattern
9 August 2007
Over the past few days, I have been investigating methods for combining RSS feeds from different sources and displaying the results. There are a number of examples that I have been looking at including adactio with his Lifestream and various scripts including SimplePie.
RSS parsing in Textpattern
In the end, I have settled on the bit_rss plug-in for Textpattern which will allow me to combine and display various RSS feeds on this blog [coming soon]. The bit_rss plug-in allows several other attributes to be set including the number of items, item order and the Textpattern form that is used to display the results.
Use with FeedDemon
There are several other potential uses, including the display of RSS articles from an RSS reader like FeedDemon. In this case, FeedDemon allows RSS items and other links to be stored in News Bins so that you can keep interesting articles; this is a bit like Bookmarks or Favorites in browser terms.
The key feature of any News Bin is that it can be shared as an RSS feed with a few clicks. It's then a simple matter to display the items using the bit_rss plug-in or another RSS parser script.
It's also possible to display excerpts for each item by combining the bit_rss plug-in with the Textpattern rss_auto_excerpt plug-in. However, not all feed items come with excerpts so article excerpt display may be less predictable in some cases. It's not a major problem if you don't mind the irregular results.
All in all, I'm pretty pleased with my first attempts at RSS feed parsing. All credit to to the plug-in authors.
Plug-ins by: BitDesigns and Wilshire One.
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