Share and share alike
I decided to set up Facebook Notes to import posts from my Electoral College blog. This seemed the quickest way to promote the new blog to my political-geek friends. While I was at it, I thought it would be cool to also import the Vox blog, and other stuff like my Netflix reviews and Flickr photos.
(I can't move all my content onto one service, since each collection of stuff is for a different audience; Someone who finds me by Googling the presidential election process has no reason to care about my photos of cats, for example. But all of it would be fun to share with my Facebook friends. Fun for me, at least.)
Anyway, Facebook lets you import only one RSS feed at a time. So I had to find a way to merge the feeds into a superfeed for Facebook's benefit. I sampled several feed-merging tools; None of them had the flexibility I wanted, until I remembered Yahoo! Pipes, a tool for mashing up, filtering, and re-organizing web content. I had poked around with Pipes during the initial buzz last year but never really utilized it.
I was fairly quickly able to set up a pipe to:
- Aggregate multiple feeds (so far, just the two blogs) into a single feed
- Stamp each post's subject line with [Citizen Elector blog] or [Vox blog], adapting a popular pipe called "Add Feed Label to Each Item Title"
- Sort by date
- Output to a new RSS feed
It's working brilliantly, except for a bug where Facebook imported all my posts twice and I had to manually delete the dupes.
