Sunday Salon: Slight change in RSS feeds

This will probably only be of interest to participants in and followers of the Sunday Salon. I went a little nuts tonight and made some improvements to the Salon's group RSS feed. The big change is that now each of the titles that comes in via the feed will be prefaced by an abbreviated name of the blog it comes from. So, say, a post from Maxine over at Petrona will now be easily distinguished from a post by Clare from Keeper of the Snails:

PETRONA: Sunday Salon post
SNAILS: Sunday Salon post

I wanted to do this because it will make it a lot easier on Salon readers.

In doing this I wound up changing the address of the Yahoo Pipes page where you can read all the Salon posts. It was here. It's now at this more easily remembered address: http://pipes.yahoo.com/dhamel/sundaysalon. I've updated the links on the Salon site. If you had subscribed to the Salon feed by email from the old Pipes page, you'll want to subscribe to the new one. If for some reason you had subscribed to the long Pipes RSS feed instead of the FeedBurner feed, you'll want to change your subscription. Anyone who subscribed to the FeedBurner feed need make no changes.

For anyone interested in the nitty gritty, what I'm doing with Yahoo Pipes may be of interest. Here's the old Pipe I had made. It's pretty straightforward. It takes all the RSS feeds from all the Salon members, filters them for the keywords "Sunday Salon" or "TSS" in the title, sorts them by date, and outputs a group feed.

Here's the new Pipe. As you can see, it's vastly more complex--which is why I didn't jump to doing this as soon as I figured out how to do it. But it's not really more difficult conceptually. For each RSS feed, I affix a specific word or phrase to the post title. Then I take the output of all the feeds thus altered, unite them together, then run all that through the filter and the sorter and output it as a group feed. it's just awfully unwieldy in the end. Still, I think it's worth it to have the prefixes.

If anyone finds that their feed isn't coming through properly come next Sunday Salon, let me know and I'll try to figure out the problem!

Tags: The Sunday Salon, affix source to title, Yahoo Pipes, prepend