Aggregating myself with Yahoo! Pipes
I sat down to take all the data I spew at places like my own blog, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Flickr into one aggregated bowl of RSS love. The result of my feed union isn't an hour by hour diary of my day, but does create an ephemeral stream of things that are undeniably me. The same techniques could easily be tweaked to document your day to near pinpoint perfection, if you're so inclined.
The Pipes components you'll need are Fetch, Union, and Sort. Drag your first Fetch onto the sheet to get started.
Paste the URL of your first victim feed into the Fetch box. If the feed is valid, you should see the universal RSS orange logo pop up next to the URL.
Fetch doesn't work exactly the way I'd guessed, and because of that it took a little experimentation to make this work. For some reason, if you add all your URLs into one Fetch, the sort doesn't process them correctly and they will never meld into something that makes chronological sense. Drag a new Fetch to the sheet and repeat until you have all of your feeds entered.
Next, we'll drag in Union. Union allows you to put the feeds together in a way that retains any extended specific data contained in only one feed. For RSS newbies, think about the Union step like shuffling together a few decks of cards at once; All the cards will end up in one stack, but not in the specific order you want them.
Attach the Fetch blocks we created earlier to the top of the Union. A Union will allow you to connect up to 5 feeds. I haven't tried to connect more (yet) but I'm guessing that multiple layers of Unions could be used.
Now that we've unified the feeds, we'll use Sort to straighten them out. Drag in Sort and connect it to Union. You should also connect the bottom of Sort (the output) to Pipes Output.
The drop-down box to the left of Sort will show "Updating" for a few seconds. This is Pipes attempting to catalog all of the feed elements which you could use to perform your sort. Once the drop-down fills in, we'll select PubDate, the date and time which the element was published. We should also set the order to descending, so that the resulting feed contains every item from our originating feeds, ordered from new to old.
That's it! If we click on Pipe Output, Pipes should grab and massage all the data and display it in the preview pane.
My resulting feed takes information from my blog, Flickr, Twitter and del.icio.us and creates Aggregated Grant, a meta feed my friends and family can watch to get a better idea of what I do everyday.
