I’ve blogged about my gripes with multiple blogs in the past, concluding with an informal protest to only use one.

A specific instance of the problem that I mentioned was having a personal blog in addition to blogging under a company. Well, it turns out that you can have the best of both worlds with little to no effort.

Yahoo Pipes takes advantage of the fact that so many sites and services distribute some form of feed syndication. It allows you interact with feeds from different sources in an absolutely incredible amount of ways. Through graphically playing “connect-the-dots” with various modules and/or filters, you gain an unprecedented amount of easily accessible power to create mashup feeds. Of course you can export these to RSS (or JSON), but they even offer email or mobile exports!… and publicly sharing the “source” file so others can copy your project where you left off and continue it!

Okay enough fanaticism (although it is completed warranted), and lets get back to the topic. Grabbing feeds from separate employee blogs to combine on a company blog has always been an option. However, Pipes makes this so easy that you have no excuse to not use it.

Here’s a simple proof-of-concept… totally usable though. It uses the “fetch feed” module that you pass an RSS url to. Then, the sort module is used to sort for the most recent entries by date published, and even by new blog comments. And then… nope that’s it, just connect to the “pipe output” module and you’re done!
(Note that I only included my blog here in the RSS, but you can add as many as you want to get mixed in by just hitting the “plus” icons):
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=3PcgeID42xGTQKjsy6ky6g

Another cool thing you could do is make a filter to only grab posts out of the feeds to put on the company blog that have been posted under a certain category… sweet!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 2:49 am and is filed under Blogging, Feeds.