I realise I’ve been a bit vague about how this works so please ask any questions (my next step was to try experimenting with turning Google Sheets into a feed aggregator)

Martin

This is very interesting! I’ve struggled with feed aggregation for a long time in my courses and have used all sorts of feed aggregators. What I would like to have is a simple form (such as the one you’ve made) where the students themselves register the feed which contains the course related posts. At my department we are having students taking more than once course at a time which is why we tell them to create a specific category (or tag) for each course. E.g. http://myblog.wordpress.com/category/courseX/feed/. This is where I run into trouble. If I would ask the students to add the course category URL, the feed autodiscovery feature in your script will only identify the main feed. I’ve solved this problem by adding an extra form field for the course feed, which means I’m really not using the autodiscovery feature. That’s fair enough.

My next problem is a bit worse. Since the students are supposed to follow each other’s work, I would like to provide them with a combined feed with posts from all feeds registered in the OPML file. I could import the opml into my personal Google Reader account and share a combined feed from there. But the problem is that Google Reader won’t poll the opml file for changes.

So the big question is:
Is there a way to get a combined feed that regularily checks the opml file for updates? Yahoo Pipes! should be able to do this but I haven’t been able to make it work.