Blogs about All Online Information for RSS and XML

RSS really is just a specific type of standardized XML. The purpose of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is, as you may have guessed, to syndicate content. The most common use of RSS is to quickly and easily follow your favorite blogs from either a desktop RSS reader, or possibly a browser based reader.

Yahoo Pipes is many things, but the one important to this article is its ability to allow you to create a mashup of RSS feeds with filters and restrictions. The beauty of Yahoo Pipes is that it was developed to allow the average business user to create rich applications without any programming experience. I have spent countless hours on Yahoo Pipes developing “pipes”. It truly is an amazing tool.

Twitterfeed.com is a great tool for Twitter because it allows you to take an RSS feed and post the content of the feed at a certain frequency right to Twitter, 1 post an hour, 3 posts a day, etc.

By using the Pipe, you can enter multiple RSS feeds into the Pipe and filter the articles by a keyword. For example, By coupling that with a keyword filter, I can filter out all of the articles that do not have “college” in the title of the article. I can also run a keyword against the description of the article.

By doing this, I create an RSS feed that is appropriate for my Twitter account by mashing up articles from dozens of sources that have “college” in the title. People who follow my financial aid focused Twitter account will appreciate the articles that I post because they are relevant.

So with two simple tools and a little research, I can provide extreme value to my Twitter account in addition to my regular tweets.