July 03, 2006
Managing OPML
For whatever reason, I didn't really get into when it launched and haven't yet played with OPML Workstation, though it's on my to do list, but I have been playing with Blogbridge Library (here's my trial account) becuase I like the shelf metaphor, and I've also been playing with FeedCollectors, mainly I think because I saw it announced someowhere on the day I was looking for a way of collecting feeds into OPML files (so I could upload them to my Blogbridge Library.
Here, then, is a brief review on how the playing has gone since I posted my review of Blogbridge Library.
First off, I've been struggling with a way of uploading individual feeds to a Blogbridge Library shelf. Secondly, I'd like to be able to reorder the shelves, and perhaps drag items from one shelf and drop them on to another.
The second is self-explanatory (hopefully) but the first I can perhaps describe a little more clearly by comparison with Squidoo, a 'lensing bookmarking service' that lets you collect bookmarks related to a particular topic ina user managed 'lens' and organise links within the topic/lens in a set of user-defined subtopics (modules). (Stanford's H20 Playlists are similar.) For those of you who haven't visited Squidoo, here's a lens I set up to go with a talk about Firefox: ffSearch on Squidoo.
What I like about Squidoo, and what I'd like to see developed for the Blogbridge library, is the way you can bookmark pages (as in a social bookmarking system) from a bookmarklet, and associate them first with a lens:
and then a module/subtopic within a lens:
The mapping I'd like to see made form the Squidoo way of doing things, to a Blogbridge Library equivalent, is hopefully obvious: "lens to bookshelf" and "linklist module to item (i.e. feed collection) on bookshelf".
For bookmarking feeds that are hidden in a link tag (and so autodiscoverable), as for example in blog posts, it would be handy if the bookmarklet could avail itself of feed autodiscovery, as for example, demonstrated by this demo + feed 2 delicious bookmarklet .
However, until that all becomes available (here's hoping) I've needed a way of bundling feeds into different OPML collections so I could upload to the Blogbrdige Library. For some things, I could perhaps have tweaked my Pagelinks2OPMl code, or OPML persistent feedroll generators biut I figured there must be a 'delicious for OPML' service out there, and there is: Feedcollectors.
The service is still a little ropey, but shows promise. You can order feeds by collection and get OPML feeds from the collection for example:
and upload feeds to a collection either individually or via an OPML feed itself.
Several of my Blogbridge Library shelves are actually fed from OPML feeds from my FeedCollectors collections.
As with the Blogbridge Library, bookmarklet support for FeedCollectors is sadly lacking at the moment, something I may try to address if I ever find a spare half hour again...!
Posted by ajh59 at July 3, 2006 10:21 PM