OSR OPML

This title sounds extra nerdy because it is extra nerdy, but this is a nerdy hobby and being extra nerdy can sometimes be good. Assuming you aren’t already using a feed reader of some sort, here are some things you should do now.

1. Download the OSR OPML file to your computer, and remember where you put it.
2. Go to feedly.com.
3. Click on the grey “import OPML” button.
4. It’ll ask you to make an account. You can simply use Facebook, Google, or Twitter to log in, or make your own Feedly account.
5. You will see a box where you can drag and drop an OPML file. That’s the file you downloaded earlier! Drag that thing over!
6. That will upload it to Feedly.
7. That’s all the OSR blogs people have collected so far, and now you can read them all aggregated together and it’s wonderful.

A feed reader will check for updates from your blogs, grab them all, and display them as one long stream of posts. It’s very convenient.

I’ll update the file daily or something, as people add more blogs to that Google Doc. If you are already using Feedly or some other feed reader they are normally smart enough that you can import an OPML file and it’ll figure out what’s a duplicate. I’ve re-imported this file a few times to test and it seems to work out fine. If you want your blog or another blog to be part of this giant OPML file, simply add it to the original Google Doc: my scripts will eventually find the change and update the OPML file.

For those of you who care about this sort of thing, the code that makes this all go lives on Github. I also have the same information available as JSON. I’m sure someone can think of something creative to do with that.