How do I import 150 unknown RSS feeds?

May 14, 2008 9:45 AM

I have a list of a few hundred sites that I need to subscribe to via RSS. I have the URLs, but not the feed URLs. Is there a way to subscribe en masse without knowing the feed URLs? I need a way to automate this as it's something I'll need to do again in the future.

Essentially, I'm looking for a way to take my list of URLs and auto-magically turn it into an OPML file with the correct feed addresses inserted. If I can find just one site or service that will sniff out the feed URLs for me, surely it will export them again for me in the appropriate format.

I've gone as far as creating an OPML file with a line for each site, leaving the xmlUrl attribute empty (I also tried putting the main URL in there).

Things I've tried:

-- NetNewsWire (and others) will automatically sniff out the feed URLs when you enter the main URL of a site, but only when you do it one at a time. Importing my OPML file worked, but only insofar as it added all the sites to my list of subscriptions. It did not reach out and sniff out the feed URLs.

-- Google Reader does the same thing. Adds the sites to my list, but does not reach out for the feed addresses.

-- Theoretically, I could open all the sites as tabs in Safari or Firefox, and manually click the RSS fairly quickly, but the browser chokes on the large number of tabs.

Things I may resort to:

-- Paying someone $50 to do it for me manually.

posted by o2b to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Crap -- someone here just figured it out.

Newsgator will take an OPML file with the sites' main URLs in the xmlUrl attribute and sniff out all the feeds.

I can then synch that with NetNewsWire.
posted by o2b at 9:49 AM on May 14, 2008

Yahoo Pipes has a "feed discovery" ["Fetch Site Feed" or "Feed Auto-Discovery" under Sources, each behaves a little differently] module. You'd paste the site urls into that module, and connect it up to the pipe output. Then you grab the "get pipe as RSS" code. That would give you one mega-RSS feed of all of the component sources. Would that help?
posted by extraface at 7:47 AM on May 15, 2008