This is the late 2000’s, the age of the new web. The mailing list is dead and gone, and now RSS is the tool that everybody and there grandmothers use to stay in touch with whatever, from the newest gadgets featured on tech sites like Engadget to serious-business news coming straight from CNN. I think RSS is great, but what it lacks is organization. I don’t like polluting my Google Reader with feeds from big blogs, because they usually bury the good content from my blogroll buddies with millions of articles concerning the newest solid gold iPhone, which I don’t really give a crap about.  For a while I used to have 35 RSS gadgets on my iGoogle page, but that lacks practicality too: load times for all those feeds is huge, and I rarely scroll to the bottom, so I end up missing some stuff most of the time.

I thought that it would be a wicked thing to have some kind of tool that merges feeds, with using a full featured desktop RSS reader.  After hours on hours of googling around, and Nick suggesting Yahoo Pipes which I never really got a stab at, I finally found a simple PHP script that does a wonderful job of merging RSS feeds in chronological order. There’s a version for both PHP4 and PHP5, but SimpleXML is required in the latter. It looks like a pretty underground piece of code, but it gets the job done. I’ve started compiling feeds by subject, so now my feeds are all tidily sorted.

Check out it here. I know, a .CC domain is kinda suspicious (it’s the first time I see a non spam site on those domains), but the stuff is totally legit. Mad props to the coder.