Our library offers two blogs to staff. I’ve had requests lately to find out how I could take the feed for new posts on one blog and combine with the feed for new comments. Using Yahoo! Pipes, I did just that for the Reference at Newman Library blog today. Since I had to do the same for the other staff blog, Newman Library Idea Lab, I figured I might as well record a screencast showing how to do it.

If you don’t feel like sitting through the video, here’s the short version of what I did:

1. Set up a Yahoo! account so I could use the Yahoo! Pipes service to make things (account set up years ago)
2. Copied the URL for the new posts feed
3. In Yahoo! Pipes, dragged the “fetch feed” button to the right in the workspace area of the page
4. Pasted in thee URL for new posts feed into the fetch feed box
5. Repeated steps 2-4 for the new comments feed URL
6. In Yahoo! Pipes, dragged the “union” button from the “Operators” set of options on the left into the workspace and connected the feed box for the new posts and the feed box for the new comments to the union box
7. Dragged the “sort” button from “Operators” onto my workspace and connected the “union” box to the “sort” box.
8. Selected “descending” in the “sort” box so posts and comments would appear in reverse chronological order.
9. Selected “item:pubDate” in the “sort” box to tell Yahoo! Pipes what to sort in descending order.
10. Connected the “sort” box to the “Pipes output” box.
11. Saved the pipe.
12. Clicked “run pipe” so the service would generate a new URL for the combined feed.

Here are the relevant URLs for the second staff blog that I did this work for:

• Home page for the Newman Library Idea Lab
• URL for new posts feed
• URL for new comments feed
• Home page of Yahoo! Pipes
• Public page on Yahoo! Pipes about the Pipe I created that merges the posts feed with the comments feed
• URL for the new combined feed
• Screencast (uploaded to YouTube) about how I used Yahoo! Pipes