I upload my photos to my own site and have for years. I have no desire to start using flickr, or smugmug or any other photo site for that matter. I would if i were starting fresh, but I’ve just put too much time in to it to switch. A few weeks ago I found the Facebook feature that allows you to import you blog as notes. Pretty nice, but since it will only allow you to add 1 rss feed somewhat limited if you want to say, import your blog and a feed of the new albums you put in to your gallery. I coded up a trivial script the other day that proxies the KEXP Song of the Day podcast and fixes some really annoying posting date problems they seemed to have introduced as of late. (for some incomprehsible reason they don’t use a standard format in the date string and don’t even use something that is easily human readable.)
Anyway after playing around with that code (3 lines of it) I hit upon the idea of creating something similar to merge two rss feeds. There are plenty of services out there that will do this for you, but all of them I could find required me to sign up and go through a lot of process. Granted that would of been easier than writing a script to do the merge myself, but a lot less fun. So I sat down tonight to watch a couple episodes of The Wire and wrote a simple script to do what I wanted. It can be found at http://neces.com/merge_feeds.php and so long as people don’t go crazy with it anyone is welcome to use it. All that’s require is passing in a list of feeds in the url query string, something like http://…/merge_feeds.php?feeds[]=http://the-first-one&feeds[]=http://the-second-one/… Anyway seems to work reasonable well. I’ve only tested it with the two feeds I wanted to get in to facebook, but it seems to be working. It grabs the data for both feeds and then merges them in chronological order keeping things as intact as possible. The feed titles, links, etc. are kind of funky, but there’s not much that can be done (in an automated fashion) to merge all of the feeds’ individual metadata. Anyway, enjoy…this post also serves as a test of the system and it’s being slurped in to fb.