Update 19-Jan-2016

As of 30-Sep-2015, Yahoo Pipes is dead, so this will no longer work, I’m just leaving this here for archive purposes now.

You can read about alternatives here.

Also, I submitted a pull request to the ploeh blog in May 2015 that was merged and changed the RSS to limit to 10 posts.

I’m a premium NewsBlur member, and have been ever Google decided to shutdown Google Reader. Mostly my experiences have been very good, with great support from Samuel when I needed it.

However, there has been one issue nagging at me for quite a while and this is, I cannot get a feed to Mark Seemann’s blog. I posted the problem on Get Satisfaction, but Samuel was unable to help due to the size of the feed. A few weeks ago a co-worker of mine mentioned Yahoo Pipes should be able to sort this, so I finally gave it a try. For those (like me until recently) who don’t know what Yahoo Pipes is it’s “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web”.

After a few minutes tinkering, I had finally built a “pipe” that took the blog feed, performed a “truncate” operation to 10 posts and output the feed again. I then took the RSS feed to the pipe and handed it to NewsBlur and this time it coped perfectly with the feed.

Piping hot

I’m sure there’s more I can do with it, but for now that’s all I need.

So, if anyone else needs a “Last 10 Feeds from Ploeh.dk blog” you can get the here.