One of our clients came to us a few days ago asking us if we could build something to aggregate several RSS feeds and then display it on their site.
Easy enough. Except the caveats were 1) This had to be done on a shoe string budget and 2) We had no permission to script on the server side (only client side scripting allowed kids).
We put our heads together and realized that Yahoo Pipes would provide the functionality to easily combine several RSS feeds, sort them, filter them, ect. And best part? It’s all built and all free. Pipes also provides the functionality to export a pipe as a JSON feed (as opposed to RSS).
So that takes care of problem 1 and almost fixes problem 2. Of course the remaining problem is getting around the cross domain XHR restrictions on the JSON. I did some poking around the Yahoo Pipes documentation and it turns out you can add a _callback parameter to the URL and bang it wraps the JSON in a JS callback!
Issues solved. The final part was to mix in a little jQuery to load the JSON+callback feed into a <script> tag and then display it.
Total lines of code: 27 lines of javascript.
EDIT. Now with code!