cogdogblog

Cleaning Up The Syndication Pile

Just like my bookmarks, for a while I have noticed (and done little) about the discrepencies of the RSS feeds I have on my work and home computers. So in the contnued spirit of the work of Brian "Housecleaning" Lamb, I devoted some time to cleaning up the doghouse.

Mainly this was exporting my feeds from NetNewsWire from both machines as "OPML" file formats ( the outlining format/standard used well by RSS aggregators, and doing some manual combining of them into the "official" CDB feed (cdb.opml). This is also what gets indexed by the Share Your OPML site (which is trés cool way of looking at different slices of RSS feeds)

But again,. taking a cue from Brian, I went to my Bloglines account which I had not used much, at all (and wow, lots of new features!), wiped it clean, and was able to in one click, import my new feed (some feeds do not produce nice titles, so they had to be edited in BlogLines). Now Bloglines has the master, and I can reset both copies of NetNewsWire to use the beefed up list of feeds.

But wait, there is more! Now Bloglines (well likely it has been for a while) has a tool to syndicate back a collection of feeds as a "blogroll", or a one line JavaScript which can be inserted into any web page to display a list (and links) to all sites in your BlogLines collection. So Wham! Now on my front page side bar (ahem, to the right) is a "Blog Pile" dynamically displayed via Bloglines. If I manage to keep that current, I never have to edit my template again (well that portion of it).

Syndicating my list of syndications. Groovy.