This isn’t specifically LOTRO related, but if you’re reading this blog chances are you use or have seen RSS feeds.  I have about 150 RSS feeds in total that I read on a daily basis between work, games, and sports that I follow – so I’ve been looking for ways to streamline this.  This weekend I was playing with a couple of RSS related sites and thought I’d share a few my findings so far.  This may be old news for some of you – so let me know if there’s something cooler/better out there!

The first was from a link up on Casual Stroll to Mordor talking about RSS Bundles.  This is a feature of Google Reader (others probably have similar concepts) that allows you to group together a bunch of RSS feeds and publish them for others to grab and use in their readers.  So the CStM group is the various LOTRO blog and Podcast sites, which I ended up adding a number of them as they weren’t ones I had found previously.  The nice part is that you can preview what’s in the group and then once in Google Reader you can modify it as needed to remove feeds you already have, etc.  Bundles aren’t really a way to streamline your reader, but a good way to share sites and feeds with others.

The other one I’ve been playing with is Yahoo Pipes – it isn’t quite as easy to use as the bundles but much more powerful and there are quite a few examples you can start from.  So far, I’ve used it mainly to merge various separate RSS feeds into one and filter out duplicates and advertisements.  I’m also using it to filter the main LOTRO rss feed to just return items with specific keywords I care about.  I plan to start playing around a bit more to see if I can set up some searches as there are some neat looking examples that pull data from other sources, not just RSS feeds I’m paying attention to.  These can also be shared with others – check out my LOTRO filter if you’re curious.