Thank goodness for OPML

I’ve been keeping my RSS feeds in Firefox and using this awesome extension called Sage (screenshots). Lately it’s been the first extension I install when installing firefox.

You tell it which folder in your bookmarks to work out of and then for each bookmark that is either a direct RSS URL or one of Firefox’s “Live Bookmarks”, it will query the RSS feed and see if there are any new updates. If there are, it’ll bold the entry in the feed list and then you can click on it and it’ll retrieve the rss stories and format them using its own stylesheet. You can also click on article titles or the feed title to go directly to the site. I’ve been reading people’s posts for ages without ever actually visiting their site!

Anyway, I noticed that Sage offers an OPML import/export option, and WordPress offers the same import option for links. I tried it out and it does work but Sage only keeps the RSS feed URL, not the actual site URL, so I ended up with a bunch of links that didn’t go anywhere.

About the same time, I started using Google Reader to see if it was a worthy replacement for Sage as I wanted to be able to read feeds anywhere, not just from within one of my firefox installations (home, work, laptop). Turns out it’s darn near worthy, with a few slowness issues to work out, but it otherwise rocks. One of the coolest things is that it can import my Sage OPML export with ease  – and – will even figure out the site URL to go along with the feed URL. Then, I can get an OPML export from Google Reader that includes the information I was missing from the Sage export.

Now I take this 2nd export and bring it in to wordpress (after purging all the dead links) and bingo, now all the sites I read are links on my blog!

Granted, some sort of automated process would be cool, perhaps as a future API for Google Reader, but for the time being, I’m happy with the process.

As for Google Reader, one of its downsides is that it will not authenticate you against protected feeds, like livejournal friends-only RSS feeds. Sage would use your firefox cookie because it works within the browser to communicate. Reader doesn’t give you any opportunity to login to feeds, so hopefully they’ll get that fixed.

And as for Sage, I cleared out all the feeds that I read in Reader and now it only has the 4 or so friends-only livejournal feeds that I have been granted “friend” status to read.

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