I was having breakfast with a group of friends yesterday when the topic of “mashing” came up. They were not talking mashed potatoes, they were talking about new tools available to mash and mix content into new forms.

Mashing is nothing new. In the 1990s many sites mixed content using SSI calls ala Perl/CGI and JavaScript. I still have web sites that rely on CGI based SSI includes to deliver content from different sources to one page. I suspect many sites still use Perl and CGI even though PHP and MySQL continue to grow in popularity.
I’m not going to get into Ajax, Yahoo Pipes, and other various tools available, just going to talk about RSS and some ways I’ve seen it recently been mashed or mixed. On the topic of mash ups, seems the general consensus from the breakfast was “how do you mash?”

There are many ways to make mashed potatoes. Let’s start with the first and most important ingredient, the potato. I went to a web site called KenRadio (with permission) and used the authors daily MP3 podcast’s as the potatoes. I added some “spices” using a JavaScript generator on KickRSS.com (a mash making tool). I blogged about it and posted the JavaScript output on pickmeclickme.com (mashed potatoes on a plate).

The web site pickmeclickme.com is in itself a sort of mash up of mixed content. All of the keywords running down the right hand sidebar of the page generate entire pages of on-topic content (via RSS) when clicked on. Like, 2007topsongs.com, this web site was created and loaded with initial content in about one hour.

www.2007topsongs.com was created the first weekend of February while my friends and I were having breakfast. The web site uses direct RSS feeds (from the source content creators), mixed RSS feeds (from KickRSS.com), and JavaScript generated mixed feeds (also from KickRSS.com). Some of the feeds are related to revenue share programs (such as iTunes) and some are straight informational, resulting in increased traffic to the source content makers.

You may have been looking for something more modern or fancy and maybe we’ll get into that soon. I’m working on cleaning up the JavaScript RSS feed tool and will post more information about that to this blog when it’s complete (or at least updated). Read the article on pickmeclickme (link above) for a good example of RSS content output inside a blog post.