AmateurRadio.com

Not strictly ham radio but parts of it are. For a while I’ve used rss readers to get the content I want into the reader of my choice. For a while that has been Google Reader. But since its demise I’ve lacked a concise and simple way of getting that information into a reader I use daily, MS Outlook. The annoying thing was that there are a bunch of ham radio news aggregators about that do a great job of popping content onto your virtual doorstep but most of them send out excerpt’s rather than the full text. Something that bugs me a bit.

So I decided to find a way of aggregating the rss data I want into a single feed, to remove duplicates and give me full text and photos of the news. So here’s how I did it.

1. Find the feeds you want http://g7kse.co.uk/feed (for a bit of shameless promotion)

2. See if the feed is chopped off by looking at the content. If its short all the time then chances are it is. Mine isn’t but many are

3. If it is, head on over to FullTextRSSFeed and plonk int the URL and let it do its thing

4. Login / Sign into yahoo to get to Yahoo Pipes

5. Pinch my pipe and make it work for you. They are fairly self explanatory and much underused. Replace the URL’s with yours. Run the pipe and get the RSS feed from that

6. Run the pipe and get the rss output (highlighted) and you should see something like this. The full URL is written there, bit of a mouthful. I tried to shorten it to something a bit more catchy and it didn’t work so just use the link above.

There seems to be more efficient ways of doing this but this method seems to work well enough for me. I’m sure there will be some aspects that don’t work for everyone, I’m not a developer so basically I don’t really know what I’m doing and this is the result of my fumbling about. I do hate it when computers don’t do the things I want them to though and spare a thought for my boss who gets a full rant every now and again when there isn’t a button to press to do a computers job !