news aggregator

Posted January 22nd, 2008 by Gabriela

the link to my blog is broken. Could you please delete it, Rudolff? I’ll add it again. I’ll pay more attention next time.

sorry 

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On January 22nd, 2008 Rudolf said:

Actually, we’re being extremely unbuttoned and trustful in this matter: for the time being, we’re giving all accredited course participants full administrative power over the feeds in the aggregator — if you’ve goofed up, please feel free to edit the subscription.

I should add that we’ve got this great old spanking machine tucked away in the back room dungeons. It’s a bit creaky from recent disuse, but we won’t hesitate to crank it up for anyone who abuses their admin privilege over the feed subscriptions. :-|

On January 22nd, 2008 Gabriela said:

settled.

On January 22nd, 2008 Rudolf said:

Cool. Thanks for fixing it!

On January 29th, 2008 Lucy said:

I can’t get Netvibes to accept the opml file, can*t see what I’m doing wrong. Am on a mac and saved the contents of our opml file into a text document which then asked me whether it should save it as rtf, word or html, it didn’t seem to have txt or opml so I chose html, could that be my problem? I started to put feeds in individually but I’m here to learn stuff so maybe someone could point me to the bit of the manual I’m supposed to read.

Lucy

On January 29th, 2008 Rudolf said:

As a rule to live by: don’t edit code in word processing applications such as MS Word or OOo Writer— nothing good will come of that. To edit code, use a text editor.

In this case you should manage to get by without one, though. Just view the OPML file in your browser, right-click on it and then save as whatever you’d like on your desktop (works in Firefox; other browsers may or may not show you the raw OPML). I’d suggest smielt.xml or smielt.opml as suitable file names.

Then import from Netvibes (or any other feed reader).

Good luck!

On January 29th, 2008 Rudolf said:

One better: just right-click on this OPML file link, then select "save link as" and save it to your hard disk as dekita.opml (or suchlike).

Some OPML importers, e.g. the WordPress.com blogroll, will also allow you to point to an OPML file’s URL, so you never need to save it locally.

On January 30th, 2008 Lucy said:

Thanks Rudof,

I looked for the "save as" but couldn’t find that option on my new mac (no, not even when I did ctrl click) so I persevered and found a "convert to plain text" command in my text edit program which then let me save the thing without sneaking in unwanted formatting tags or whatever it does. Now I have all the links in the feed of my Netvibes page.

Thanks for being so quick and helpful Rudolf, you’re a star!

Lucy

On January 30th, 2008 Rudolf said:

I’m glad it worked.

For right-click read control-click on a Mac, I suppose.

On January 30th, 2008 Rudolf said:

A few users have reported that their Wordpress.com blogs fail to import the regular SMiELT OPML under Blogroll > Import Links. I’ve just created an alternative version of the file, which imports without any difficulties.

Whereas the regular OPML file always reflects the most recent changes to the site’s database, the alternative file does not: it’s a static file and won’t update automatically. I don’t know if there are going to be new additions to the Aggregator — if there are, I might, once the signup is formally concluded, create another OPML file that Wordpress finds agreeable.

On January 31st, 2008 namckeand said:
Thanks, Rudolf! It worked perfectly!
On January 31st, 2008 Rudolf said:

This one is from the mail bag:

> I tried adding
>
> <http://dekita.org/smielt/files/smielt.opml>
>
> to RSS widget and it didn’t work.

OPML, RSS and Atom are three separate XML formats: RSS and Atom are (primarily) designed to syndicate content: OPML is designed to move outlines from one place to another. The outline presented in smielt.opml is a blogroll (of sorts). To import it to your WordPress.com blog, go via Blogroll > Import Links, then either give the URL or upload your local copy of the file.

The SMiELT OPML is a blogroll only of sorts because it contains an outline of feed URLs. A blogroll, however, links to other blogs’ main pages rather than to their feeds. Yet the Wordpress.com blogroll importer adjusts for that and the blogroll that appears in a blog’s sidebar, as on on Nancy’s blog, will link to blogs rather than to their feeds.