Added an OPML file to my website
================================
Links page
----------
The search engines tend to lead people to the big commercial websites.
Smaller websites, personal blogs, and other independent sites are hard
to find.
Everybody is struggling with the algorithms. Search engines are
becoming useless because of the bad search results. Those who are
still on social media like Facebook and co are puzzled by their
timelines, mostly filled with unwanted content. And independent
creators are faced with an uphill battle to find visitors to show
their work.
This is why I started an old-fashioned `links' page on my website [1],
to promote smaller websites, personal blogs and other independent
sites.
Feeds
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RSS feeds play an important role in the fight against the algorithms.
* The feed reader shows the latest from only those websites, you
choose to follow.
* The RSS feed on your website allows people to follow your website
and get notified when you have made a new publication.
Of course, getting your information from your hand-picked sources has
the risk of living in an information bubble. Reading self-selected
content strengthens your opinions rather than challenging them. It
doesn't hurt to add some -for you- controversial sources to the list
of feeds to follow.
OPML file
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Providing a OPML file can lower the threshold for people to start
using a RSS feed reader. Because of this, I decided to add an
OPML file to the `links' page on my website.
Newsboat to the rescue
----------------------
This was easier thought than done. The links on the links page
are collected over time, and I only have the URL.
Last week I manually went through the list of links, opening
each link and searching in the HTML source for the RSS feed,
either RSS or Atom.
The result was a list of feed URLs. The next challenge was to
convert this to an OPML file.
From the time I used newsbeuter/newsboat I remembered that those can
export an OPML file. I installed newsboat on a virtual machine. With
some ed magic I transferred the file with the urls into a
kind-of-OPML-file (with only the feed url) and imported that into
newsboat. Next I used the export function to create the OPML file.
The OPML file looked a bit unstructured. In Emacs I marked the
region with the URLs in this file, and sorted the lines.
The file is now online, see [2].
Anyone can download this file, and use it as a starter, or just use it
for some inspiration.
Happy RSS-ing!
[1]:
http://box.matto.nl/links.html
[2]:
http://box.matto.nl/opml.html
(Both links can be opened with https too)
Last edited: $Date: 2024/02/21 10:23:24 $
