Blendr Blog


Keepin' your feed blending real.

Improving Feed Formats Support

From the suggestions of a few users, and my own desire to improve the functionality of FeedBlendr, I’m hoping to increase the number of feed formats/variants/dialects supported in the near future. At the moment, the way that FeedBlendr works means that it only supports (or rather only outputs) pretty bare-bones feeds. This means it almost always works, but it also precludes it from doing really cool things like creating belnded podcasts or vlog feeds amongst other things.

I’m going to be working from Niall Kennedy’s list of feed specs, and hope to ensure support for these formats (and possibly more if I can figure out a reliable way to open up the elements I pass through):

If there are any other specific formats that you’d like to see FeedBlendr support, please use the comments to let me know!

8 Responses to “Improving Feed Formats Support”

  1. Sr-ultimate.com | Web 2.0 & Me Says:

    FeedBlendr : Blend all your favorite feeds together…

    FeedBlendr is an application which will merge two or more feeds. If you have 5 blogs with feeds, be it atom or RSS 2.0, just specify the urls and click Blend, thats it ! All you 5 blog feeds will apear on the feedblendr URI. You can choose from RSS 2.0…

  2. Thomas Clausen Says:

    I’ve really been looking for this thing for quite some time, unfortunately it doesn’t support æ ø å which are very commonly used in my native tongue, Danish. 🙁

  3. beau Says:

    Thomas, have you tried using the new beta version to see if it supports those characters properly? http://beta.feedblendr.com/ Please let me know if it does/doesn’t work.

  4. Thomas Clausen Says:

    Great stuff it looks like it’s working. Thanks a bunch.

  5. Thomas Clausen Says:

    Although the alternativetext is still wrong… But is that a WordPress bug maybe?

  6. Thomas Clausen Says:

    Spoke too fast 🙂 The links aren’t in chronological order in the beta Feedblendr output, eventhough I’m using the same feeds:
    http://feedblendr.com/rss/8812
    http://beta.feedblendr.com/atom/68

    It’s the same input, but different output.

  7. Abdul Qabiz Says:

    I just heard about FeedBlendr today and checked it immediately. I have worked on something similar for one of my projects, remixing feeds.

    I noticed, when I mix (blend?) two Media RSS feeds, the output feed is not really Media RSS feed. It contains “atom” module.. I don’t expect it in output. I expect a proper RSS 2.0 feed with minimal dependencies (only known popular modules – media, itunes, dc etc). In my case, FeedBlendr renders to be unusable because of the given reason.

    I would like to see an intelligent system. I don’t know who is your target users, but if you are targeting developers, you need to provide more flexibility (API, options to customize output feed?).

    Another point, I can’t consume the (feedblendr) output in my Flash/Flex apps. You need to place crossdomain.xml on your server.

    -abdul

  8. beau Says:

    Hi Abdul. Can you give me an example of the blend/feeds you’re looking at and getting non-compliant output from so I can check it out please?

    Right now, the target is actually not for developers at all – thus the focus on absolute simplicity. As I develop this further, I will be adding a lot more customization options (once accounts are available), including things like limiting the number of entries shown etc etc. As for an API, there is actually a simple version of one available now – as detailed on http://feedblendr.com/developers/#api

    Also – I didn’t realize that a “crossdomain.xml” file was needed, but I checked it out and see what you mean, and it’s now in place so please let me know if it works.