Mashing up RSS feeds with Textpattern
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.
Related Posts
Comments
Stunning CSS3: A Project-Based Guide: Use this book to work through a series of practical yet cutting-edge projects. Each chapter walks you through standalone exercises that you can integrate into projects you're working on, or use as inspiration.
» Buy from Amazon.com · Amazon.co.uk
We Like
ThemeForest sell a range of site templates from some fantastic designers. They also sell some great WordPress themes!
Online invoicing made easy with CurdBee!
» Sign up
Join SugarSync for online backup. Sync your files between Mac, PC and mobile phone. Get 5 GB FREE and up to 10 GB bonus space!
Featured Book
HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World will show you how to create websites using these new methods.
This easy-to-follow guide covers everything you need to know to get started. You’ll master the new semantic markup available in HTML5, as well as how to use CSS3 without sacrificing clean markup or resorting to complex workarounds. Buy the Book! · FREE Chapters
makss 14 January 2010, 07:20 1
The continued development of plug-in bit_rss is the aks_rss plugin (based on bit_rss 0.4.1 by Bit Santos.)
Phil 5 August 2010, 10:03 2
Have you found simple way to do a daily archive of your mashup pages? I’m seriously considering not using Textpattern for a site I’m working on so that I can have a cron job call a script that copies the mashup page into an archive folder and adds a link to it in an index page.
Have you looked at Yahoo Pipes? It’s a really neat application for collecting together, merging, filtering and sorting RSS feeds into a single feed for your pages. The solution I’m working on uses this and Simple Pie to give me almost complete control over my mashup and the layout of the articles on the page.
Cheers, Phil
Clive Walker 5 August 2010, 10:46 3
@Phil: I have not done much work with RSS mashups recently. I think you can run cron jobs within Textpattern using a plugin though. The aks_cron plugin might do what you want?