I’ve updated the OPML import/export patch for Mozilla Thunderbird that I mentioned before. The new patch comes from Robert Sayre, and improves both the import and export of OPML files. Full details are on the Thunderbird Bugzilla tracker.
I have updated the patched, downloadable version of newsblog.jar for your hacking pleasure.
In case all of the above was gobbledygook to you, here are some definitions:
- OPML
- Outline Processor Markup Language. This is a file format often used by feed aggregators to exchange information about subscription lists.
- Feed
- Many web sites, both blogs and traditional news outlets, provide articles in a special format known as a ‘feed’. The most common feed format is RSS, but another, more recent, contender is Atom. A feed may contain the full text of all articles from a site, or in some cases, just summaries. By checking the feed periodically for updates, one can easily find out when new content is available in an automated fashion, typically by using a feed aggregator.
- Feed Aggregator
- Software designed to read feeds on a regular basis, and alert users to site updates. There are many variations on aggregators. Some are stand-alone applications, others are add-ons for existing applications, and some are web-based services. Using an aggregator is an effective way to monitor a large number of web sites and filter down to the very latest information quickly and efficiently.
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- The stand-alone email application from the Mozilla project. Recent versions of Thunderbird added the ability to read site feeds, however the user interface is still lacking several key features, such as the ability to mass-import (or export) subscription lists from an OPML file. The patch mentioned above adds this ability.
- RSS
- Really Simple Syndication, or alternately, Rich Site Summaries. There are several different versions of RSS, but the most common are RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0, which are quiet different in their details. RSS 2.0 is a simpler XML format, while RSS 1.0 is an RDF format. Due to the confusion of “competing” versions of RSS, a segment of the blogging community invented a new format called Atom, which has been gaining in popularity.
- Atom
- The Atom specification came about as an effort to solve several problems in the various versions of RSS. In addition to the syndication format, it is also used as the core of a publishing API (similarly, RSS 2.0 was used as the core of the metaWeblog API. However, Atom is much more thoroughly thought-out). I won’t bore you with the details here. If you’re really interested, you can just Google up some links and spend a few hours catching up on the history.
Basically, if you want to keep up with the latest news from a large number of web sites, you use a news aggregator. You “subscribe” to a site’s news feed by adding it to the list of feeds in your aggregator. That software will then let you know which sites have updated, and which ones have not. When you see an update, you can either read it directly in the aggregator, or click a link to view the actual site in your web browser.
An aggregator will most often present you a summary of updates and headlines. You can quickly peruse this summary to determine which articles look interesting enough to read in more detail, and which ones you might want to just ignore. This is usually much quicker than clicking through to every site that you want to keep track of in your web browser, only to see that most of them haven’t updated since the last time you looked.
7 Comments
Sorry the latest version of the newsblog.jar file doesn’t work for me
First off the Import OPML button open a dialog that lists XML files by default. I tried renaming an OPML as XML, but no joy. I use SharpReader for feeds.
The previous version used toi work on TBird 1.0 but had a low tolerance for
When I download the jarfile using Firefox 1.04, i get the error message Java VM Launcher: incorrupt or invalid jarfile. Help!
Fred: Right-click on the link and do a “Save link as…” to save the file instead of letting Java attempt to launch it.
Hello,
Thank you for the jar file which allows the export of the rss
My version of Thunderbird is version 1.2
For the characters special :
Example : “je suis pas là ” (in french in the text
To add the line to the beginning of your file .opml
With that not of problem !
Excuse me for my English not terrible.
Thank you !
I’m running Thunderbird v1.5.0.9. I followed the instructions to download the file and put it into the Chrome directory. Unfortunately, I’m getting the following error message:
XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: chrome://messenger-newsblog/content/subscriptions.xul
Line Number 42, Column 1:
OPML Import and Export has been a built-in feature of Thunderbird for a while now. This hack is no longer necessary.
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[...] upport for importing your feeds via OPML!! Hello - useless?? Dougal Gunters has written a hack that will add this feature. Perhaps someday I’ll try it, or more l [...]
to write something about our favourite mail software: Thunderbird. You can use this open-source mail reader (yes, it doesn’t cost anything!) to read your favourite RSS feeds. It has auto-update feautures too. And you can import OMPL lists simply using this little hack . It’s nice: you open up your mail reader and you don’t have to open up another software to simply read your Feeds too. Anyway… I don’t know if Thunderbird really supports all the feautures that FeedDemon has now. Anyway it’s a nice alternative
XML Entities, How do I hate thee? Let me count the
I hate HTML and XML Character Encoding, what a nightmare.
This all started yesterday. Actually, this all started several days ago with a post to our Campus “Network Administrators Group”
to write something about our favourite mail software: Thunderbird. You can use this open-source mail reader (yes, it doesn’t cost anything!) to read your favourite RSS feeds. It has auto-update feautures too. And you can import OMPL lists simply using this little hack . It’s nice: you open up your mail reader and you don’t have to open up another software to simply read your Feeds too. Anyway… I don’t know if Thunderbird really supports all the feautures that FeedDemon has now. Anyway it’s a nice alternative
Thunderbird. You can use this open-source mail reader (yes, it doesn’t cost anything!) to read your favourite RSS feeds. It has auto-update feautures too. And you can import OMPL lists simply using this little hack . It’s nice: you open up your mail reader and you don’t have to open up another software to simply read your Feeds too. Anyway… I don’t know if Thunderbird really supports all the feautures that FeedDemon has now. Anyway it’s a nice alternative
Thunderbird and OPML
Added OPML patch to Thunderbird, broke Livejournal.
[...] orld!” Blah » Thunderbird and OPML After applying the OPML export/import patch from Dougal Campbell, I can now import the OPML of m [...]
[...] manent Link: Thunderbird and OPML”>
Thunderbird and OPML
After applying the OPML export/import patch from Dougal Campbell, I can now import the OPML of m [...]
) new items for my Internet Archive Tonight playlists over on WebJay.org. The first issue is to investigate some possible bugs related to duplicate channels in the newsfeed tree (you can see them if you use the t-bird OPML import/export add-in for the manage subscriptions dialog). The second issue is to see if we can further automate the “audition: process. I can well attest that building playlists from archive.org postings can be a very labor intensive process and Matt mentioned this too.
Blogs: I also wanted to give thunderbird an other try for feeds (I’m using sage plug-in for firefox). But there is no opml import/export function and I don’t want to type my xxx blogs entries. Fortunately someone add the same problem (full details in bugzilla) so I used his hacked version of thunderbird to import my feeds. But I lost my feeds folders
I need to rearrange all of them… I’m not sure I use thunderbird for feeds… we’ll see.
I am sorry, I was jumping to conclusions. In all my enthusiasm I failed to notice that the hack that I describe above does not allow you to import your opml file, only export. I will find out how to do imports too [IMG :)]. Update #2: Some body wrote about this already and got the correct fix. Download his version of ‘newsblog.jar’ to get both export and import opml functionality. Posted in Software | No Comments »
[...] ML import yet. Another quick search, though, finds lots of angst about that, as well as a solution from Dougal Campbell which works just as advertised. Now [...]
[...] ot Thunderbird? Wish to hell you could import/export RSS feeds via OPML? So did I - then I found this patch. Download. Overwrite original. Profit.
[...]
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i primi due lo uso da tempo, ancora non l’avevo testato come lettore di feed. Stavo già per rinunciarci appurata l’impossibilità di importare file OPML (hai voglia a inserire uno a uno cento e passa indirizzi di feed…), ma poi sono incappato in questa pagina di Geek Rambling e voilà , ecco che si possono importare, ed esportare, gli opml: basta sostituire il file newsblog.jar del proprio TB (normalmente nella cartella \chrome) con quello modificato e d’incanto compariranno i pulsanti ‘Import OPML’, ‘Export OPML’.
[...] Kaikkien Thunderbirdiin haalimieni blogi- ja muiden virtojen osoitteiden siirto BlogBridgeen olisi ollut tuskaista työtä käsin tehtäväksi, mutta onneksi siihen ei tarvinnut ryhtyä: Dougal Campbellin OPML-vientilaajennusta käyttäen sain tarvittavat tiedot ulos Thunderbirdistä niin, että ne pystyi sen jälkeen tuomaan (Guides > Import…) BlogBridgeen. [...]