Can I import Firefox boomarks into Google Reader?

February 16, 2009 8:06 PM

Can I import my Firefox bookmarks into Google Reader?

I installed the OPML Support Ad-On and exported bookmarks as OPML file. But when importing them into Reader, it gives me the error "Your OPML file could not be imported. Please make sure that it is correctly formatted and try again." Can I only import livemarks, not bookmarks? I don't have livemarks, only standard bookmarks. I tried all the different options -- with and without maintaining folder structure, etc. Nothing works.

posted by timnyc to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Google Reader is only for Livemarks/RSS feeds, so can't be done.
posted by deezil at 8:26 PM on February 16, 2009

A bookmark is (usually) the location of a web page, while a livemark is the location of a RSS/Atom feed. OPML only works with feeds; an OPML file containing locations of web pages is invalid, which is why Google Reader won't import it.

I don't know of a way to make Google Reader import multiple feeds based on a list of bookmarks (although it will do so for an individual web location using the "Add a subscription" button). I suspect if you want to do this, you'll need to add them one by one.

Probably the most efficient way to do this would be to open all the pages you want to import in tabs, then starting with the first tab, click the orange feed icon on the right side of the address bar to add the feed to Google Reader. Once it's added, close the tab, repeat for the next tab, and so forth. This will go faster if you set Google Reader as your default feed reader (Options/Preferences --> Applications --> Web Feed --> "Use Google").

Keep in mind that RSS/Atom feeds are a specialized type of content that must be explicitly provided by a website, and not all sites offer feeds, so you may not be able to import all of your sites into Google Reader. Also, Firefox is not perfect at detecting the presence of feeds, so if you don't see the feed icon in the address bar for a given site, scroll down and look for it within the site content (usually on the right or at the bottom of the page).
posted by [user was fined for this post] at 7:17 AM on February 17, 2009

[user was fined for this post]: Probably the most efficient way to do this would be to open all the pages you want to import in tabs, then starting with the first tab, click the orange feed icon on the right side of the address bar to add the feed to Google Reader. Once it's added, close the tab, repeat for the next tab, and so forth. This will go faster if you set Google Reader as your default feed reader (Options/Preferences --> Applications --> Web Feed --> "Use Google").

This is it.

You can export your bookmarks to HTML in Firefox, so I thought that might be a viable option, but it looks like it'd be a real hassle. You can see how tough it'd be if you export your bookmarks and then open the bookmarks.html with Notepad. See that html file? You'd have to make it look like this OPML file. And then you'd have to stick "/rss.xml" at the end of every web address; even then, you'd just have to hope that all of those web sites use domain.com/rss.xml as their rss feed address, which is really just a pure guess when it comes down.

In short: there is no way to do this manually that isn't an extraordinary hassle. Opening in tabs and clicking rss links is probably the easiest way.
posted by koeselitz at 9:17 AM on February 17, 2009