RSS Mixers: The Options At A Glance

Posted by Sharon Hurley Hall on March 18th, 2009

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

As bloggers, there is always more that we can do with RSS. If you have been blogging for a while, then you have probably burned your feed with Feedburner. You may subscribe to several feeds and have a preferred feed reader, but what if you want to do more? RSS makes it easy to follow and republish blog content, but you only get a single feed for each site. If you want to collect feeds around a single subject or track all the posts that you have authored across the web, then you need a feed mixing tool. There are several to choose from.

On Test: Four No Registration RSS Mixers

When I started putting RSS feed mixers to the test, I didn’t want to register to use them. I found four tools that I could use straight away. Of the four, I was least impressed with RSSMix which looked good when using the site’s sample feeds but balked at my Feedburner feeds. FeedCombine was another tool that worked better with the samples than with my actual feeds. Although it worked with Feedburner, there were errors when parsing the feeds because of my Kontera ad code and when I did get a feed, all formatting had been removed, making it virtually illegible.

Feedity worked well for sites that had no RSS feed, but with a site that had an existing feed, I ended up with a comments feed instead - not what I wanted. The best of these tools for me was RSSMixer, which created my mixed feed quickly and gave me options for tagging and sharing.

Other Options

You can’t mention RSS feed mixers without considering Yahoo Pipes. You will need a Yahoo account to use this and then you can choose from a number of sources and inputs to mix your feed. If, like me, you find putting your own mix together somewhat challenging, you can browse the directory of existing pipes and then remix it to create the feed you want. XFruits is another promising feed mixer, which I hope to review soon. I also looked at:

RSSMesh - a php script from FeedForAll, though you need to pay $29.95 for access to the script directory
BlogSieve - has several options, but before you can get your feed you need to enter your email address and activate an account
Feedjumbler - created a feed immediately, but I couldn’t preview it to see if I was happy

For even more feed mixing options, there’s a good list at All RSS. What RSS feed mixing tools have you tried?

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3 Responses to “RSS Mixers: The Options At A Glance”

Karen Swim Says:
March 18th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Sharon, I have not tried any but your post just helped save me a lot of time and aggravation. This is great information. Thanks for going boldly where few have gone and writing about it!
Marc | Jetstreamtraffic Says:
March 18th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
This post is in perfect time for me. I have a lot of content that I want to play with and distribute various RSS feeds.

Twitter, Facebook, Feedburner, Aweber, Blog, my own Social network…etc

I was experimenting with Pipes last night but it clearly needs a lot of time to learn how to get the most out of it.
Sharon Says:
March 19th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
@ Karen: Glad it was useful. The post came from my own experience of trying to find a good feed mixer

@Marc: I agree with you about Pipes. I would love to find an easy way to get more from it.