Help me get my feeds home.

June 8, 2009 3:22 PM

How do I export a whole bunch of Home URLs from NetNewsWire, or an alternate RSS feeder for the Mac?

So I have a lot of subscribed blogs in NNW. I wanted to send a list of the websites that they're from to someone. I thought I could do this easily in NNW. I was wrong.

I've never used Applescript before, but I tried hacking the included Applescript files. There is an appropriate property (home URL), and I can get it to export the Home URL for the current selected feed, but if I select several, it just gives me the last one I clicked on, and if I select a group, it just gives me an error. I have several hundred feeds to export from, and this seems an absurdly inelegant solution.

Can anyone help me here? I tried exporting an OMPL file and attacking it with Applescript, but being a complete newbie, I can't figure out how on earth to get the info out of it. Any help would be much appreciated!

posted by Magnakai to computers & internet (3 comments total)

I found a javascript opml parser. Basically you copy / paste the nasty xml and it parses out the list of links suitable for copying into an email.

Open your opml file in a text editor (TextEdit on the mac), and copy it into the site.
posted by cschneid at 3:41 PM on June 8

Your first stumbling block is that the sample scripts that come with NetNewsWire all work only on a single selected subscription, IIRC. And figuring out how to loop through a selection in AppleScript is...less than intuitive.

This script will give you a list of the home URLs of every subscription in a group called "export"...

set exporttext to ""
tell application "NetNewsWire"
	activate
	set exportfolder to first subscription whose display name is "export"
	repeat with Sub in subscriptions of exportfolder
		set exporttext to exporttext & home URL of Sub & return
	end repeat
end tell
tell application "TextEdit"
	activate
	make new document at the beginning of documents
	set the text of the front document to exporttext
end tell

posted by bcwinters at 6:14 PM on June 8

Both are goddamn fantastic. I fucking love you guys so hard.
posted by Magnakai at 7:48 PM on June 8