Aggregator is a good idea: subscribe to a single feed and read multiple feeds in return. Not to mention, each aggregator was built with a shared-context in mind: topical, community, or whatever reason that may satisfy your liking.
Unfortunately, Yin cannot exist without Yang. Aggregator’s advantage is its main drawback. Subscribe to a aggregator is like “all or nothing” relationship. You cannot filter-out blog you really don’t like. Living in a world that we can freely buy singles and not the album, blog aggregator is a blasphemy to the Long Tail religion. Thanks to Yahoo Pipes, we can nuke blogs we don’t like, thus bring balance back to the Force.
It should be easy and intuitive.
First, we set a feed source. I set values to Planet Terasi and Merdeka. Remember, type (or copy paste) only feed value. So in this example I type:
- http://planet.terasi.net/rss20.xml on first text input.
- http://feeds.feedburner.com/Merdeka on second text input.
Second, filter those feeds based on our criteria. Let’s say that you had enough reading my blog. You found that I become more egocentric than ever and at certain point reading my blog eventually escorts your mind to a painful torture that you never know of before. That’s okay. I don’t wanna be everything for everyone either.
To skip my feed out of two aggregators, you only need to add a filter, set Rules value item.link to ‘andry’. Every item that has permalink containing the word “andry” will be out of your radar from now on.
Save your pipes. Browse to My Yahoo Pipes pages, and subscribe to the pipes’ feed that you just created. Now you have your own customized aggregator. Welcome to the Long Tail club.
ps. You can also filter it again based on uniqueness (so blog that included in both aggregators won’t appear twice) and/or any other operators. I leave it as an exercise.
