xFruits aren't ripe yet

Just a quick update on my weekend experiment with xFruits: Though I did successfully mash the feeds and republish content from other feeds to my personal blog, it did not turn out to be an automated result. I still needed to manually update my xFruits settings to get things to flow from feed to blog. The API that facilitates the republication does not appear to be "always on" -- at least not the way xFruits interacts with it.

Witness my post on CommuterDaddy, which I have purposefully not pushed through manually to see how long it takes to jump automatically from the feed through the API, if it does at all. Some of the comments on the xFruits blog seem to indicate it happened weekly for some early adopters. Of course, that would not be nearly frequent enough for our purposes.

More to come....

Tossing an xFruits salad

Please pardon this interruption in content- and marketing-focused blog posts as I dabble in technology a bit and test the feed republishing from the Ottaway Online Editors blog to my personal spolay 2.0 playground.

If successful, this was accomplished using xFruits, something Yoni discovered earlier this week that I've now had enough time to dive deeply into this morning. If not successful, well, it's back to the drawing board....

The idea behind xFruits is to mash up feeds for almost any purpose you can dream up. It's basically another flavor of something like FeedDigest, which we used to combine our football feeds for NewYorkVersusNewEngland.com.

So far, FeedDigest was easier to manipulate in terms of mashing feeds dynamically into an html page with other elements.

xFruits has proven quite capable, though, of mixing multiple RSS feeds into a single feed, and essentially walked me though how I could use the Blogger API to pull feeds from this blog and my CommuterDaddy one into spolay 2.0. For blog aggregation, it seems to be ideal.

The only drawback so far has been that when I first set up the feeds, it republished everything that was available in the feed, and Blogger republished everyting using the time stamp at which the items were received. So I had to go back and reset time stamps -- and weed out older posts when I got tired of redoing timestamps one by one. Not xFruit's fault, I don't think. The bugs seem simply to be Blogger functionality drawbacks.

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