Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with opml

RSS Feeds -> OPML -> List of websites...how?

divabat — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:19:03 -0800

How do I get a list of all the blogs I'm subscribed to, plus their URLs? I use FeedDemon/Newsgator. I'd like to generate a list of all my feeds, plus the site URL, into one document. Categorisation doesn't really matter at this moment.

How do I accomplish this? I figure I'll need the OPML file, but how do I turn it into something readable?

If possible I'd like the URL of the SITE, not of the RSS feed. Aside from a bunch of searching feeds, this shouldn't be a problem. However, I do know that a bunch of the sites I subscribe to use something like Feedburner to manage their feeds. How do I get the source URL?

I tried searching Google but I must be missing a keyword because I can't get anything useful.

Fix my broken blog subscriptions!

softlord — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:00:33 -0800

One of the most obnoxious features of Thunderbird-as-RSS-reader is that when checking feeds it will display "http://feedurl.com/feed.xml is not a valid feed" in the status bar, but there doesn't seem to be any actual log of the broken ones anywhere, nor does there seem to be any way to view the errors as a list. I can export my list of feeds to an OPML file, but the only OPML validators i've been able to find online only tell me if the opml file itself is a valid format, not whether any of the linked-to xml files are either 404-ing or otherwise broken. This leads to me to my followup: 1) Is there any way for Thunderbird to give me a list of feeds it considers to be broken and unretrievable OR 2) is there an online service that can take an opml file and check the links for validity?

How do I import 150 unknown RSS feeds?

o2b — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:45:51 -0800

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.

Creating a custom search engine from a set of bookmarks?

imposster — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 07:17:25 -0800

Trying to turn a set of bookmarks (del.icio.us) into a custom search engine. I want to be able to not just search my bookmarks, but search the content of my bookmarks - and not just all of my bookmarks, but sets of my bookmarks defined by tags.

Rollyo - doesn't allow more than a few urls

I think Google Co-op might be the solution, but I can't figure out how to import the bookmarks into the engine except manually. Once they are in, the search engine is highly customizable, but it would be best if it could be done on the fly.

Is there another option? Maybe this cannot be easily done with the del.icio.us export options.

How can I build an OPML renderer in PHP5?

tommorris — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 09:55:19 -0800

WebApplicationFilter: Help me build an open-source outline renderer in PHP. Currently it is a practice among some people (me included) to build distributed directories using OPML. Thanks to the profusion of tools available to create OPML, it's relatively easy to contribute to these distributed directories, but hard to render them up. Currently, there are some good methods for doing so in JavaScript - Grazr and Optimal - but there isn't a very easy way of doing so on the server side. Except, of course, the tools available in the UserLand Frontier environment, but that's not something I want to battle with (and neither, I suspect, do many other people). JavaScript is fine, but I would like to be able to view things on my mobile device.

I'd like to build one, but it seems a pretty mammoth task to me. Basically, I'm thinking that I could build this in PHP 5 - but I'm not totally sure where to start. Should I use the DOM extension? SimpleXML? XSLT? I've used all three, but I'm not sure which would be best for this project (and, I admit - as a fairly newbie developer, I can't quite see the forest for the trees at the moment). I'm capable enough to pull stuff out of the OPML file, but it's getting it to follow the links through to the relevant file that gets me stuck.

The way that OPML distributed directories work is that you might have a directory tree, and a particular branch of that is handled in a completely separate document - and gets "included" when you render the document up.

Ideally, I should be able to set it up so that a person can visit whatever.com/directory/Foo/Bar (with Foo/Bar being branches on the tree). It would be helpful if it could be implemented in such a way that it can be run on the hosting account of anyone who's got PHP installed - but Cache_Lite would also be useful to have.

The way this is currently implemented in Frontier is through the functions listed in these two files: walk and viewpage (the language resource for UserTalk is here. A working example of this code in action is here).

If this is going to be a lot of work, do you think it would be possible to formulate the instructions above in to a form suitable to hire out to someone on a site like oDesk or Rent-a-Coder?

Also, any code that I produce (or commission) will be released under the GPL. Any output that it produces will also be good web standards XHTML as well (I hope) and may also use microformats where appropriate.

I have placed this up on my blog also, so non-MeFites can comment.

Help me help a group read feeds

mikel — Fri, 26 May 2006 12:03:00 -0800

I have a gig helping someone get up to speed developing marketing capacity for a startup, and one of the first things that we're going to do is make sure good info is coming IN to the company. Please help me figure out the best tools to use! One of the tactics we're pursuing is to help ensure that the execs have good information coming in regularly from the WWW using RSS/Atom feeds. I want to deliver a quick-and-loose implementation as quickly as possible.

So, what I have come up with is very simple - get everyone to install FeedDemon, import a pre-populated OPML file that includes a) some Technorati tag feeds, b) a Del.icio.us feed that each of the group can bookmark to (this will then become a distribution loop)., and c) a bunch of other RSS feeds that are relevant.

The downside is that with this system, updates or wholesale changes to each person's feed list will be difficult. Down the road I want to install a Scuttle-type system and maybe something like PlanetPlanet behind the firewall to accomplish the same thing in a much more interactive way.

What else can/should I include to do this effectively? Any way I can easily accommodate changes to the shared list coming from any individual participant?

Synchronizing FeedDemon and NetNewsWire?

dnm — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:17:36 -0800

How do I easily keep my feed subscriptions the same bewteen FeedDemon on Windows and NetNewsWire on Mac OS X? Right now, I export my FeedDemon subscriptions to OPML and then import them into NetNewsWire, which works fine, but I wonder if there's a better way, even if it's just doing a bit more with the OPML export (like putting it on a web server both readers can fetch it from) or something else. Extra points if there's a way to keep individual posts between feeds in both readers synchronized, but I don't suspect there's a simple way to do that.

Exporting bookmarks: Firefox to OPML?

Grod — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 15:15:50 -0800

Can I export my firefox bookmarks to OPML? If so, how? If not, why not?

opml -> html

will — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 05:12:58 -0800

Anyone know a quick and simple way to convert opml files into html? I've found two good XSLT stylesheets, but the W3C XSLT Service seems to be fudging the links.