OPML dashboard
Tony Hirst, who I have mentioned on this blog lots of times, has been looking round for a startpage that will accept OPML batch loading of feeds.
Most startpages have an RSS feed widget, some even have their own RSS Reader widgets (an RSS reader in a widget).
Grazr and Bitty (which can be embedded into startpages) are an example of yet another style of widget, being RSS Reading List widgets.
Other widget pages that come to mind are webjam and yourminis…one other OPML widget is available from widgetbox.
But what Tony is after is one RSS feed per widget, but instead of adding them individually, he wants to add them in one go via an OPML URL.
Anyway he has made this service himself called the OPML Dashboard, whack in an OPML Reading List and presto, a widget page full of widgets, one box per feed.
Here’s my OPML Reading List of 10 feeds, and here is what it looks like on this on-the-fly widget dashboard.
I can bookmark this page to come back to it everyday, but wouldn’t it be good if startpages, just like RSS Readers allowed you to import OPML Reading Lists.
Bozpages, an old chestnut, is the same as OPML dashboard and more…you have another 2 views; river of news and cloud view…here’s my try.
Yet another one is FeedRaider (review), add an OPML file only, and instantly get a page full of RSS widget boxes (also has a river of news view)…I made one without having to register.
Not sure about Speedyfeed (review), it wasn’t working at the time of publishing this post.
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OKay - so I didn’t know about the old chestnut bozpages etc etc…
but here are a couple of points of interest about the OPML Dashboard: firstly, it was put together in just a few minutes by cutting and pasting Google feed API code and a snippet i found that parsed opml in javascript (i.e. it’s an example of quick’n'dirty mashup code); secondly, it was easly extended to add a filter so you can subscribe to a feed and filter the results displayed in each feed contained in the opml file using your filter term. Thirdly, it was easy to add a link to the OPML dashbaord from a previously cobbled together social bookmarking tools OPML feed roller. I may add the news OPML roller too, some day…
tony
Comment by Tony Hirst — July 11, 2007 @ 12:05 am
You can try out the RSS/opml/video/podcast widget that we have. It does all that you mention.
One of our developers, Frank Spitzka has a tutorial up about it on his blog.
http://www.springwidgetsunleashed.com/
The post:
http://www.springwidgetsunleashed.com/2006/11/creating-opml-file-for-your-rss-reader.html
Comment by don synstelien — July 12, 2007 @ 1:34 pm
Thanks Don,
Pretty cool hacking up that widget, I thought it was a standard one feed widget…you could put all that functionality into the UI.
It kind of competes with Grazr, although Grazr goes further as you can read the actual feed items, not just the titles.
Comment by Johnt — July 12, 2007 @ 1:52 pm