I first thought about Yahoo Pipes and using that service to create custom RSS feeds for Google Plus. It should be doable, but it is not something that an inexperienced user would be comfortable working with.

Dapper, which is owned by Yahoo as well, is a streamlined alternative. I’m now going to show you how you can use Dapper to create a Google Plus RSS Feed.

Create Google Plus RSS Feed

Visit the Dapper website and click on the create a new Dapp link once the home page has loaded.

This takes you to the Start screen of the Dapp Factory. Here you need to specify what you want to create. In our case, we want to create an RSS feed. We also need to select a website url that we want to create the RSS feed from. This is the posts page on Google Plus, e.g. https://plus.google.com/115604903045061277330/posts

Click the Next button afterwards. You can close the Demo that is coming up or skip it. You should see a Google Plus posts page on your screen now. Click the Add as Sample button at the top and then on the Next Step button in the left menu bar. Confirm that you only need that one url in the prompt that pops up.

Dapper analyzes the page for a moment and will then display the same page again. You will however notice that your mouse selects elements on the page automatically when you hover over them. You now need to select the items on the page that you want included in the RSS Feed.

Since Google is not displaying dates we have to resort to the content and the posters name. Start by moving the mouse over the name in the Posts area. A click on the name should highlight all post names on the page.

Click Save Field and enter a name for it (e.g. Name). Leave everything else as default and click Save.

Now for the difficult part. Move your mouse over the content area, so that all of the post sans the name, post status and sharing section are included. The easiest position to do that is the lower right corner of the post.

All contents should be displayed in the footer area again. Verify that this is the case and click the Save Field afterwards. Give it a name, like Content, and pick Item Text this time. Click Save afterwards.

Now that we have got our two data fields we can move to the next step. Click Next Step to proceed. You should now see a preview of your new RSS feed on the next page.

Select your content fields at the bottom and save them as a group. This ensures that the program will always pair them up.

You can then save the app. You need an account to do that. Account creation is not complicated and done in less than a minute.

The Use This Dapp module is then used to create the RSS feed. Click the Choose a format pulldown menu and select RSS Feed from the list. A click on Go creates the configuration options.

Here it is then necessary to select the Item Title and Text. Pick the right fields that you have created in the previous steps. You should see a preview of the RSS feed on the same page.

The RSS feed link is displayed as well. Just copy the feed url and paste it into your feed reader

You need to repeat the steps for every Google Plus stream that you want to monitor in your RSS reader. Dapper sometimes had issues displaying the Google Plus pages in their interface.

Update: Google seems to have blocked Dapper actively. Users receive the following message: Access to this site is disabled. Dapper users have been blocked by the content owner of this site. Sorry.

The service that I’m using to create custom RSS News Feeds is called Dapper. Dapper can do much more than merely creating a RSS News Feed but that is what I want to concentrate on.

The example that I’m going to use is a RSS News Feed for software updates at Nirsoft, one of the most popular software programmers out there who is not offering an RSS News Feed. We start by loading the Dapper website.

Enter a term that is describing the project, for example Nirsoft and click on the button Create a New Dapp. You could also try a search first to see if anyone has already created what you are looking for.

Enter the URL of the Nirsoft website (http://www.nirsoft.net/) and select RSS Feed as the format. A click on Next loads a preview of the Nirsoft main homepage. If you scroll down you see the What’s new section. That’s the section that we want for our RSS Feed.

That section is only visible on the page we are on. We add that page to the basket. The basket is used for analyzing page contents. Adding additional pages helps the application to determine the contents of the pages which is only possible if a website contains pages that look similar but offer different content, for instance a Google search for two different search terms.

We only have on page that gets added to the basket. A click on Next Step and OK loads the page where we make the selection of the contents that we want to show up in our RSS News Feed. If you move the cursor around in that preview window you notice the rectangle that encloses elements on that page. This is being used to select the contents we need.

Scroll down and pick the Date in the What’s new section. A click on one date should mark all dates yellow. This shows you that the application has identified the dates correctly. You need to make sure that only the dates are marked on that page. If you scroll up you see that the main menu was also selected. A click on one entry there removes it again.

If you scroll down again you see that most dates have also been unmarked. To change that click on the second date which should again mark all dates and nothing else. You can check the Preview Selected Content section at the bottom to check if only the dates have been selected.

A click on Save Field will save those information, select Date as the name and the Date Published checkbox. We got the date but we need additional information because we also want to know what got updated. Each entry contains a link and a name of the application that got updated. That will be our second field.

Just click on the first application and notice that this time everything gets marked correctly. A click on Save Field will let us save that field again, select Name and pick Title from the checkbox.

You should see two fields in the lower right section. A click on Next Step will load a preview of the RSS Feed that we have created. If everything looks ok click on Next Step which will load the final step. You need an account at this point before you can save the newly created RSS News Feed. It’s free and seamlessly integrated in the process.

Now select a name, description and tags for your dapper and save it. A profile page will be loaded in the end that contains the link to the newly created RSS News Feed. It will be previewed on that page as well.

As I mentioned earlier Dapper can do much more. It can provide XML data which can be used in applications. It’s pretty amazing and offers lots of possibilities.

Update: I have removed the link to the created Dapper application as it has been removed from the official website.