kidmercury

I recently talked about how the RSS feeds on my blog stopped working, effectively going on strike.

The short answer regarding the problem is that I was importing too many RSS feeds for my CMS to handle, and it started choking on some of them.

Not a big deal, I thought; I could just move my RSS processing over to an application that specializes in that. There are a bunch of options: FeedRinse, RSSMix, FeedShake, Yahoo Pipes.....plenty of choices.

All of them have issues. RSSMix combined all my feeds (well over 100) but then only imported posts from Techmeme and JDawg. FeedRinse has a killer UI, although it also doesn't shoot all the feed items through, for whatever reason.

Most surprising was Yahoo! Pipes' poor performance; it too could not handle 100+ feeds, simply being unable to merge them. I was really surprised by this: an infrastructure player like Yahoo has a mashup tool that can't handle a few hundred feeds? That's pretty lame.

I'm just getting started here with my plan to leverage the disruptive potential of RSS to remix the web of lies into a web of Truth -- a web of Truth that sets mankind free. I'll need to be able to mix thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of feeds.

As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty adamant about not building a business that does application development, aside from open source hacking and API integration; leveraging the edge for all its worth is absolutely essential, in my opinion, to my long-term business objectives (i.e. world domination). FeedXI is what I'm currently working with, and it's pretty good -- although I have to test it out more before I give it an official thumbs up. They do allow you to upload an OPML file of RSS feeds you want to mashup, but that function didn't work; it did one of things where it says "importing" for half an hour but just stays stuck in that position. So I had to upload each feed one by one.

Ugh.

But other than that, it looks pretty good. Very nice UI.

If you know of any applications that can do bulk RSS mixing and mashing and actually work, let me know. I'll continue to test stuff out and give you my take on it.