Make a module that is a feed of multiple other modules?

Question

This is a very basic question, requiring only the broadest of answers. I'm pretty new to Joomla and CMS development.

On the homepage of my joomla site I have four feeds showing articles side by side.

One is a mod_feed reading and RSS, one is a mod_widgetkit_twitter showing my tweets, and two are mod_zooitem's showing my Zoo "knowledge base" and "news" respectively.

I want to have one module that shows a feed of all four of these sources mixed in together, ordered chronologically.

I am about to embark on the messy and longwinded task of making a diffiuclt-to-access page on my joomla site showing all four feeds next to each other, then writing a script to scrape all four feeds and add the new entries to a DB or an XML file, making that script a cronjob and then writing a new module that displays news from the collated DB/XML file.

I feel like there's probably a more elegant way of achieving this and I was wondering if any of you have any good ideas? I'm using Joomla 3.4.8.

Answer 1

Sorry if my answer is too obvious, but why can't you write a custom module and then borrow code out of the other modules to pull all the data in, sort by date and build your own output? The notion of scraping the data off your own site seems... well... y'know... how does one put it...