Simple Feed Rolling for GReader Users – Bundles

One of the most common requests that I can think of from newcomers to the “loosely coupled teaching” approach is:

“How do I roll together a number of feeds and produce a single RSS feed for them.”

Over the years I’ve recommended any number of approaches, from Yahoo Pipes to Grazr. But in trying to share a bunch of feeds with a colleague today, I stumbled on a feature of Google Reader I hadn’t used before that makes this dead easy. Named “Bundles,” these are essentially a simple way to publish a web page that represents a folder of RSS feeds from your reader. To make a bundle, simply click on a folder in Google Reader

Click a folder's options

Then Save it…

Save the Bundle

And voila, what results is a public HTML page aggregating the feed, with a subscribe button, as well as a link to the ATOM feed and OPML file.

Resulting "Bundle"

I’m not suggesting everyone has to drop their current approaches and flock to GReader, just that this is yet another simple technique to add to the basket that makes combining, remixing and repurposing content that flows via RSS just that much easier. And that has to be a good thing. – SWL

OPML file of all Northern Voice attendee blogs

http://wiki.northernvoice.ca/f/nv-feeds-subscriptions.xml

I hate technorati. It doesn’t freakin’ work. And this year, for whatever reasons, there seems to be a reluctance to provide a “Planet Northern Voice” aggregator like in past years. So my solutions was to cull all of the “blog” feed URLs from the attendees pages. I’m using this directly in my Google reading – I had not realized that Google Readers let’s you constrain your search to a folder of feeds, so by simply searching on “Northern Voice” in this folder of feeds, I’ve got my own aggregator of just NV posts that in my opinion provides way more depth of coverage than technorati (and without all the cruft of the Jaiku feed someone put together which includes all the flickr and twitter feeds as well). Hope it is of help – you are of course free to use it yourself and add  other feeds if you feel it isn’t comprehensive enough. – SWL