RSS feed for "aggregators":

Mail me:

List of RSS subscriptions

see also update on 2002-12-26

What is it?

It is a list of RSS feeds that appear on my Radio aggregator that's readable by the public. Radio users: Look at RSS Explorer instead of this page. (Install RSS Explorer Tool first.)  A few RSS feeds are missing because they are generated by a RSS screen-scraper running locally on my machine and have 127.0.0.1 as host in their URL.

How is the list made?

• Input: Radio keeps the list of subscribed RSS feeds in an OPML file: http://radio.weblogs.com/0107481/gems/mySubscriptions.opml
• Program: http://radio.weblogs.com/0107481/opml2html.xsl is an XSLT stylesheet to transform the list of RSS feeds in OPML format to a HTML table.
• Service: http://www.w3.org/2001/05/xslt is a service provided by W3C.
• Output: Goto the W3C page and enter http://radio.weblogs.com/0107481/opml2html.xsl  as 'URI for xsl resource' and http://radio.weblogs.com/0107481/gems/mySubscriptions.opml as 'URI for xml resource' then you get the list of RSS feeds. Radio users: Use your own OPML file as 'URL for xml resource' and save the URL output as your list of RSS feeds if you want to make your list available to people who don't use Radio.

Why is the list made in this way?

I chose to generate the list using a remote XSLT service because

Reason #1: XSLT is easier. Given that OPML is XML, you can parse it using any language to convert OPML to HTML. Or you can code in Radio Usertalk language to read the Radio's data structure like Jon Udell does. But for myself, XSLT is the easiest way to deal with XML for the most part. XSLT has severe limitations but it lets me do most things faster than kludging SAX or DOM, the twiddle-dee and twiddle-dum of XML processing techniques.

Reason #2: Deployment, update and maintenance are easier this way. Whenever my subscription changes, so does the list of RSS feeds because Radio automatically updates and synchronizes the OPML file. Because Radio also takes care of the XSLT code likewise, any changes I make there is also automatically available to the public. There is no need for manual updating. When somebody clicks on the list of RSS feeds, the result is very much up-to-date.

If the list is generated by Java code for instance, every time I change my subcription (it happens quite often) I'd have to rerun the code and I'd have to copy the list to the right place (be it inside another webpage or a folder in remote webserver). Yes, this task is automatable using cron and scripts. But this means another headache of management and I have no desire to overburden my brain and my home computer with trivia.

One risk remains that W3C's service may not be reliable or may disappear without notice. But by then I hope Radio would ship its XSLT tool. Considering the alternative, I find this risk tolerable.

BUGS

None. Really. But if you're really picky here it is. Because OPML does not sort the feed names, ditto for the list. XSLT can sort but I haven't.

Feel free to adopt and adapt the XSLT code as long as you take all the responsibility of the result and don't lie about its origin.

References and inspirations

Take a look at following pages for other usages of XSLT and OPML.

• OPML and XSLT
• activeRenderer XSLT demo
• How to create a Blogroll with Radio's outliner
• Links for Blogroll, RSS and Subscriptions
• OPML loader
• OPML links
• OPML

update on 2002-12-26
From comments on http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000386.html#000386:

<plug>
Another XSLT solution to this, with integrated subscription links, is at http://purl.org/net/syndication/subscribe/.

See for example Jay Han's list at this address.
</plug>

Last update: 12/26/2002; 8:21:23 PM.