I am working on an RSS project called FeedHenry (but launching soonish as Millifeed) and would appreciate your help. If you have an OPML file from your current aggregator please send it on to me. We want to have as many relevant feeds as possible when we launch. Anyone sending in their OPML file will get onto the beta access queue and I’ll buy you a pint should we ever meet in a pub. Thanks.
Archive for the ‘OPML’ Category
Got OPML?
Thursday, May 10th, 2007Ruby + OPML
Monday, August 28th, 2006Ruby really is more productive. I wanted to add OPML support to a project of ours and from past .NET experience with this wasn’t looking all that forward to it. But rexml and rio came to the rescue.
Here is some sample Ruby code that extracts all the URLs from an OPML file:
opml_file = ''
rio('http://share.opml.org/opml/top100.opml') > opml_file
opml_doc = Document.new(opml_file)
urls = XPath.match(opml_doc, '//@xmlUrl')
That is it. rio does the hard work of saving the web-stored OPML file into a string. rexml does the hard job of parsing that string into an XML document and then we use XPath to find all of the xmlUrl attributes.
rexml comes with most standard Ruby installs and you can install rio with gem install rio. The rio documentation is here.
Feeds for forums
Tuesday, July 4th, 2006In Threaded RSS readers for Yahoo! and Google Groups EirePreneur nails how we can use OPML to make feeds work with discussion forums:
Yahoo! will provide you with a single OPML URL for all your Groups subscriptions - each node at the top level will correspond to a Group. The next level down will be a node corresponding to each topic lead and the leaves will be feed items (individual topic posts), or sub-nodes as necessary.
While EirePreneur goes on to say that this is where feed grazers are strong I don’t see how a traditional 3-pane feed aggregator with a live OPML subscription feature won’t work either.
