Friday 9 January 2009

Running Blogs Superfeed

Somebody (Chris Russell) came up with a 'great' idea that may be it might be fun to create an aggregated RSS feed of running blogs.

Never one to dodge a challenge, I thought I'd have a go.

The result is this site. From here you can access the 'super' feed of aggregated feeds from a growing number of running blogs.

The actual URL for the feed can be found on the right-and panel of this blog. It can also be found here. There are also a number of rather attractive-looking buttons on the side panel which allow you to subscribe to the feed using a number of well-known RSS/newsreader services.

The superfeed is created from a spreadsheet of RSS feeds from running blogs. The spreadsheet is a publicly available, publicly writable document on Google Docs.

If you have a running blog that you would like to add it to the super feed, you just need to open the following Google doc and add your blog name and RSS feed : click here

The spreadsheet gets exported each time anyone adds a new RSS feed.

To add your blog to the super feed, you must add the RSS feed address of your blog (not just the web site address). This means that if you have a Blogger.com blog and your blog address is http://MyRunningBlog.blogspot.com, your RSS feed is http://MyRunningBlog.blogspot.com/rss.xml. If you don't add the RSS address, it won't work...

Once you have added your blog, it may take a while to work its way through the system and appear on the super feed. Give it at least a couple of hours.

When you point your RSS reader at the super feed, it should show the latest 30 posts from the aggregated super feed.

As people update their blogs, the super feed will also get updated. Your position in the aggregated feed is purely determined by time (i.e. when you last posted), not postion in the spreadsheet, so please just add your entries to the bottom of the sheet.

Have fun, and happy reading!

Nigel.