I'm trying to use the service at feedcombine.com and display the output in an app with the RD RSS plugin. But I can't work out how to get the image icons to display. I added guid as the Image XML Element, I ended up with a blank space where the icon should be, then my app crashed when I refreshed the RSS. Any suggestions please?

I haven't signed up for it (although it does indeed look interesting) I did take a look at the 'sample' xml file that was listed as an example feed. It seems all of those images are preceded by the tag <figure>a bunch of info and then</figure> Have you created your custom xml feed, and then dissected it (in a text editor, or other app) to see which tags are valid for your RSS? I haven't done too much RSS in BT, so I may not completely have a handle on your issue. Cheers! -- Smug

Yep, I'm looking, but I may not be seeing. The nub of the problem is that you need to assign a value in the RSS plugin control panel that matches the Image XML Element in the feed. I currently needs two values. I'm digging in the xml, that I am not very conversant with, but some of it seems to make sense. It seems to me that not all feeds use the same label. On the ones I am playing with some feeds use media:thumbnail, some use enclosure. To get the plugin to work with a 'mashed' feed I believe I would need to 'normalise' the multiple feeds to use a common value. I have mashed 3 feeds together to view on one reader. Two of the feeds show the thumbnail with media:thumbnail, the third, which uses enclosure, does not. I'm now playing with yahoo pipes to see if I can change the value in the pipe. This tool looks amazing, but there is an awful lot there to play with.

There have been a couple of BT'ers that have used Yahoo pipes with some success. I agree with you though; the 'rss/xml standard' isn't as standard as I'd like. Too many different names for the same elements across publishers. That might be an issue, but again I'm not the one to ask. Keep digging and good luck; your success will bring us an RSS guru :) Cheers! -- Smug

Thanks for the encouragement Smug, you always make me smile.

I had a buddy use Yahoo Pipes with the RSS Plugin. It ended up being too slow processing-wise. All it has to do was reversed the chronology of posts. He ended up using his own custom PHP code to do what was originally done by Yahoo Pipes.

Using Yahoo Pipes has proved quite successful so far. I have been able to combine four RSS feeds into one. I was able to make Yahoo Pipes copy and rename the enclosure elements on two of the feeds, so now the RSS plugin can use media:thumbnail for all of them. I was also able to pre-pend the originator of the story into the description line, sort all the stories into date order, limit the number of entries from each source feed and remove any duplicates based on the title. Yahoo Pipes is the only tool that I have found that has that sort of power and I suspect I have only scratched the surface. The end result meets my original ambition and hopefully makes the app content richer and the navigation simpler. There are limits on the number of requests Yahoo Pipes will support, so next I think I need to cache the feed on a server somewhere.

Hi AlanMac... Just give: http://pipes.deri.org/ a try ;)

Thanks for the tip @Worker73. Looks interesting, but I found that the demo at http://pipes.deri.org:8080/pipes times out, so I have not been able to play. Have you downloaded and made a hosted copy? What is your experience with this tool?

Hi Alan... At the Moment i have no experience with it. But it looks quite Easy to Install it with an Tomcat Servlet Container.... Just take a look on: http://pipes.deri.org/doc/ Download for the JAR-File is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/semanticwebpipe/files/

Ok, understood. It looks like a it could pan out as a self hosted alternative to yahoo pipes. I have a nice solution going with pipes at the moment and as they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but on the other hand, I prefer to not rely on third party services, so I will give it a try at some point. I have never played with Tomcat either, but it's good to learn. Cheers, Alan

Just in case anyone comes across this, yahho withdrew their pipes service and I ended up using simplepie on my server, which is faster than pipes was.