Subscription Harmonizer

Submitted by Morbus Iff on Wed, 2003-07-02 08:06

As Dave has been thinking aloud on his Subscription Harmonizer for aggregators, so will I. Brian Cantoni saved me some effort by commenting about his "save the OPML to FTP" hack he did for AmphetaDesk, and I'm a fan of leaning in that direction:

  • I don't like centralized server solutions. Yes, any aggregator company could set up their own server to host the Harmonizer (as Dave suggested he would, in a very minor testbed sorta way), but that's still a central authority, regardless of how many servers there actually will be. I'd much rather see a bootstrap on vanilla FTP with OPML. Vanilla FTP 'cause hey, most everyone has, or can get, one. OPML 'cause most of the aggregators that matter can import and export the same flavor of OPML that Radio standardized on, AmphetaDesk followed, and NNW tagged along.
  • OPML is easily reformatted. Regardless of how your feelings are about REST, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc., a single, easy-to-read (and parse) OPML file sitting on the server is a lot easier to work with than requiring XML-RPC interaction. I think some people have even written OPML parsers in javascript.
  • Vanilla OPML can be imported over the web. Although I don't know if any other aggregator can do so, you can import OPML files, over the web, directly into AmphetaDesk. Upload your OPML file to a certain location with a Harmonizer, then include a link on your blog: "Import my subscriptions". One click later, your shared blogroll is imported into AmphetaDesk. For instance, Dave's OPML is online, and with one click, you can import them into your AmphetaDesk, ready for downloading on your next refresh. This just focuses on the aggregator possibilities, and doesn't consider OPML sniffers that could create blog "six-degree" communities (based on XML, as opposed to scraping blogroll HTML).