Keeping in touch with the torrents of data generated by quiz blogs (most of them from India) can be quite a task. Quizzing is so popular that there are hundreds of quiz blogs in the blogosphere. Subscribing to these blogs – via RSS readers or email – can get quite messy. Which why I thought of creating this ‘mega’ feed – one which would contain updates from the most active and reputed quizzing-related blogs.

You can subscribe to Quiz Blogs Mega RSS Feed using an RSS reader or get updates from it delivered to your email inbox. All for free. Now you won’t have to bother any more with managing multiple feed in your RSS reader or your inbox getting flooded with multiple emails.

Creating the Quiz Blogs’ Mega RSS Feed

This project was created using Yahoo! Pipes. If you haven’t heard of this or tried it out, you should. It’s an amazingly easy way to create mashups using data from different services and has a gorgeous interface to boot. You can access the Yahoo! Pipes page for the Quiz Blogs’ Mega RSS Feed here to check out the Pipes source and list of blogs from which content is being aggregated.

After creating the aggregated feed using Yahoo! Pipes, I needed a service through which users could easily subscribe. Sure, Yahoo! Pipes itself gives you many options including RSS, and exporting using JSON or PHP – but the RSS URL for example which is generated isn’t easy to remember. I chose FeedBurner for further managing the feed and its ability to offer reader-based feeds and email subscriptions.

The blogs initially included in this feed were chosen from QuizBlogs.com. Much as I would have loved to include every blog listed there, I could not because with those many blogs to fetch data from the execution time of the feed was shooting beyond control. So I decided to drop out all abandoned and / or dormant blogs. I set the limit for that as ‘should have updated within the past three months’ and arrived at a list of around 70 blogs. Even after that, the list of items in feed for the selected blogs was too large (running into more than 1000), again causing a performance hit. I therefore decided to include only the 42 most recent posts from all blogs combined.

Feedback

Any suggestions for improving this service are welcome! Leave your comments in the comment form at the end of this page. And in case you like this service, spread the word to your friends in the quizzing community.

Request For Blog Inclusion

If you have a quiz blog, or know of a quiz blog which you feel should be included in the list of sources to be aggregated, then make using the comment form below. Please note that because of factors I mentioned earlier (such as feed rendering execution time) it may not be possible to include blogs which are not frequently updated.