The Volokh Conspiracy

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Volokh Conspiracy

Looking for tech advice: Editing an RSS feed

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(Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

I'm hoping I could take the liberty to bleg—that's beg for advice using a blog—about a technical issue I'm facing. I need to create a new RSS feed from an existing feed, with just a simple change: I want to add the author's name into each title so that a post from (say) me with the title "Looking for tech advice" would be changed to have the title

[Eugene Volokh] Looking for tech advice

I used to use Yahoo Pipes for that, until it was discontinued. Then I switched to Zapier, but that's no longer usable for me, since they suddenly imposed a maximum of about 5,000 characters for each post. (That's why our Twitter and Facebook feeds have been broken for a couple of days.) I use IFTTT for some things, and I might be able to use it to send Twitter messages in the right format, but I don't see a way of generating a whole new RSS feed.

Any suggestions? If you have some, please let me know. I prefer something that doesn't require extensive coding. I can probably put together some suitable Python or Perl scripts or some such; I don't know Python well, or some of the other modern languages at all, but I used to program in C, LISP, BASIC, FORTRAN, FORTH, APL and various other languages, so this can't be hard to figure out. At the same time, my sense is that crafting my own script and running it on some off-the-shelf service would require learning a lot about the interface of that service, and I'd rather avoid that.

In any event, I'd be very grateful to hear any advice our readers might have.