OPML and RSS

Knut Magnus Aasrud has an interesting post on OPML. If you haven’t heard of OPML before (I hadn’t) it stands for Outline Processor Markup Language and is a file format for outliner applications. It’s fairly general but has found particular use as a file format for exchanging subscription lists between feed readers and aggregators. It’s an unholy collection of nasty XML—although some think “nasty” applies to all XML—but it has the advantage of holding your subscription list and being exportable to HTML so that you can share it others on, say, your blog.

Of course, if you’re an Emacs user you have no need for OPML because you already have a builtin solution¹ that does the same thing. I’m talking about using elfeed-org with elfeed as your feed reader. With elfeed-org you can list your feeds in a Org file and add descriptive text to each entry if you like. Naturally, this is exportable to HTML or most any other format you can think of so if you want to share it as a blogroll on your blog or someplace else, it’s easy. You can even export it to OPML so its capabilities are a strict superset of OPML’s.

It’s just another example of how Emacs has our backs. As I’ve said many times before, if you’re reading RSS/Atom feeds—and you should be—you can’t do better than elfeed. And if you want to see the actual articles instead of just the text, take a look at elfeed-webkit.