Synthetic Feeds and Australian Bloggers

There has been some discussion recently in the Australian .NET community about creating an Australian community weblog server, so one could have an aggregated feed for Australian weblogs.

However, to create a weblog and feed which combines Australian weblogs, one simply needs to create a "synthetic" feed - one which combines or filters each individual Australian feed. Why create a new server, when there are hundreds of free services ready to host a weblog?

One service that one can use to create a synthetic feed is Feedster (www.feedster.com). While not perfect, it can produce an amalgamated feed based on a list of weblogs in OPML (XML) format. An example OPML document that contains a list of Australian weblogs (known to me):-

OPML (XML) List of Australian Weblogs

To make it more user friendly, I have created a stylesheet (XSLT) that converts it to html for display. I have a simple transformation web service that one can use to combine the two:-

Web Page Listing of Australian Weblogs

Then given the OPML document, one can use Feedster to generate an RSS feed that combines all the Australian weblogs:-

RSS 2.0 Feed - Combined Australian Authors (last 30 entries) 

Simply add that URL to your favourite aggregator (I like SharpReader and intraVnews for Outlook).

One could use the same technique to create a quick amalgamated feed of your choice.

Update: the OPML file is now being maintained by Frank Arrigo.