The Syncing Apple An Exploration of Technology and Devices

770 Reader meet OPML Editor

One OPML reader that did agree with the OPML output by the Liferea RSS reader in the Nokia 770 was the OPML Editor written by Dave Winer.

Go figure.

RSS Wrangling on the 770

I was looking around the other day for some good gui blog posting apps for windows. But I was also looking for some good RSS readers for Windows... I ended up looking at RSS Bandit and the OPML editor from Dave Winer. The OPML editor is a bit of a trial, as I don't see how you actually use it to add and read RSS, but the Bandit works well enough. I found a great page that lists at least a hundred RSS readers for Windows, so I'm posting that URL here.
http://allrss.com/rssreaderswindows.html
After playing with a few of these to try and manage a RSS feed list for my new Nokia 700 (which comes with a RSS newsreader) I've found that these vary wildly in features and capabilities... but here are three that I ended up using. All these support importing and export OPML, which is a must if you are jumping between them.

• Sharpreader - #1 Google hit for "windows rss" - this is a speedy and nice basic aggregator. The best feature is has is the auto parse field- the URL field at the top can be use to just paste in the URL for any website, and it will rip the page up and auto-discover the feeds... then you simply click the Subscribe button. A huge time saver. What drove me nuts is that you can't move the subscriptions once you have them, for instance if you want to put them in a sub-folder.
• RSS Bandit - a really nice free aggy. This seems to output the cleanest OPML, that is why I used it.
• NewzCrawler - a fully featured reader/crawler ($20) that I used only because it has a superb organizing UI, and the interface is rock solid. It does a lot that I don't need. However, it was useful for organizing all the feeds that I grabbed.

I ended up using Sharpreader to build my raw list of feeds, just by copying and pasting my bookmarks from Firefox into its ripper. Then I exported the list and edited it with NewzCrawler. Then I exported it yet again and imported it into RSSBandit just to normalize the RSS (or so I thought). The final output was destined for my Nokia 770, but there were still issues with the OPML... see my next post for what I ended up doing.