I’ve got a list of links in the sidebar of this blog. What is not obvious is that this list is an aggregated list of links that come from multiple sources. At the moment, I mark links as interesting from two sources:

• Delicious
• Google Reader (shared items)

Ideally, I don’t want to have 2 lists on the side, especially when most items I both bookmark in Delicious and share in Google Reader.

Enter Yahoo Pipes. Its an incredibly easy-to-use and powerful tool. You can see the pipe I’ve created here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=wAcslJ753RGkTFabBR50VA. If you click the “View” Source” link you can see how its put together.

The general idea is to:

1. add multiple sources (fetch feed)
2. union them together into one feed
3. Ensure they are unique, based on the id
4. Sort them by the publish date
5. Output the result

The end result is one rss feed that contains the unique list of links and is sorted properly. I just then point the WordPress RSS widget at that feed, and it works.

You can do a lot more fancy things, but what I’ve described above is the simplest.