Sending Personalised RSS to EMAIL campaigns using Mailchimp - merge

Question

I've got a custom RSS feed set up for each user so that the user's email_address can be used as a parameter. e.g., www.website.com/feed/personal?user_email=test#email.com
If I code this URL in my MailChimp campaign using the |FEEDBLOCK:URL| MERGE tag, I'm able to retrieve posts and create an RSS newsletter for the recipient.
However, when I try to make the URL dynamic by combining it with the |EMAIL| merge tag MailChimp is unable to retrieve the posts.
|FEEDBLOCK:www.website.com/feed/personal?user_email=|EMAIL||
Instead, when I get the test email I just see the FEEDBLOCK tag in the email body (along with the EMAIL tag) as shown below.
|FEEDBLOCK:www.website.com/feed/personal?user_email=user#email.com|
I've read on another StackOverflow chain that Mandrill (and I assume MailChimp as well) cannot process nested tags. So I'm wondering whether there is another way for me to harvest the value of the |EMAIL| tag and assign it to a variable before the |FEEDBLOCK:URL| tag gets processed so that I can reference the variable rather than the EMAIL merge tag in the FEEDBLOCK:URL tag instead?
e.g.,
<%>emailAddress = *|EMAIL|*</%>
*|FEEDBLOCK:http://www.website.com/feed/personal?user_email=<%emailAddress%>|*
In short, I'm trying to figure out how to assign a Mailchimp merge tag value into a variable and then use that variable as part of another merge tag, in lieu of nesting merge tags, which apparently cannot be done.
(p.s., In case its confusing, I just want to clarify that for some reason asterisks are not showing up in the above text but I do have all the merge tags enclosed within asterisks)

Answer 1

I've been trying to do this exact same thing. You can do this in ExactTarget quite simply as detailed here.
Basically, once you have your custom RSS feed URL done, you create something called a content syndication link. For you, it would look like this:
%%httpget "www.website.com/feed/personal?user_email=[Email Address]"%%
Please note the square brackets around the term "Email Address". The brackets tell the system to replace the brackets and the content inside with whatever that term happens to reference (in this case their email address). You could swap it out for their first name, last name, wp user id...whatever you happen to have stored within your subscriber(s)' data.
Inside the content of your email, you will need to reference this link in order to dynamically generate your content, which will be unique for each user. Here's that:
%%[Var #xml, #titles, #title, #descs, #desc, #links, #link, #cnt
Set #xml = ContentAreaByName("my contents\RSSParse\RSSParse") /* This line specifies the content area from which the RSS content will be pulled for the email message. */
Set #titles = BuildRowsetFromXML(#xml,"//item/title",1)
Set #descs = BuildRowsetFromXML(#xml,"//item/description",1)
Set #links = BuildRowsetFromXML(#xml,"//item/link",1)
If RowCount(#titles) > 5 THEN
SET #rows = 5
ELSE
SET #rows = RowCount(#titles)
ENDIF
IF #rows >= 1 THEN
for #cnt = 1 to #rows do
Set #title = Field(Row(#titles,#cnt),"Value")
Set #desc = Field(Row(#descs,#cnt), "Value")
Set #link = Field(Row(#links,#cnt), "Value") ]%%
<div style="border: 1px solid #444; background-color: #F7F7F7; margin: 0.76em 0; padding: 0.76em;">
<h1 style="font: bold normal 1.0em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">%%=v(#title)=%%</h1>
<span style="font: normal normal 0.76em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #444;">%%=v(#desc)=%%</span>
</div>
%%[
NEXT #cnt
ENDIF
]%%
To clarify, the following code found above limits the amount of posts to pull to 5:
If RowCount(#titles) > 5 THEN
SET #rows = 5
ELSE
SET #rows = RowCount(#titles)
ENDIF
And the following, again found above, is where the content for the email is output and thereby available to allow you some customization of the look and feel:
<div style="border: 1px solid #444; background-color: #F7F7F7; margin: 0.76em 0; padding: 0.76em;">
<h1 style="font: bold normal 1.0em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">%%=v(#title)=%%</h1>
<span style="font: normal normal 0.76em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #444;">%%=v(#desc)=%%</span>
</div>