On my daily commute I pass some spots where my iPhones reception is flaky at best. As this leads me to staring into the void of Google Reader trying to fetch some articles, I really want to use a feed reader that downloads articles in advance. Next to this I didn’t really like Google Readers interface on the iPhone (too much unnecessary links on the frontpage and the fixed viewport makes long lines of code to be cut off) and can’t seem to recall why I left NetNewsWire in the first place.
When comparing Google Readers OPML export to an old OPML export from NetNewsWire I noticed that quite a few feeds appeared in only one of the two exports. After googling for a way create an union out of more than one OPML file, and contemplating to make one myself using the XML::OPML CPAN module I settled for the following workflow to find get the feeds unique to Google Readers OPML export
Creating an OPML export out of Google Reader can be done in Settings and then Import/Export
In TextMate
- Apply a regular expression replace to both OPML files. Replace
.xmlUrl="(.?)".|.with$1 - Use the Filter through Command
sort|uniqon both files and save them - Select both files in the Project Drawer and apply a diff to the selected files
- To only keep feeds unique to the first OPML file use the Filter through Command
grep '^-' - Apply a regular expression replace replacing
^(.*)$with<outline xmlUrl="$1" /> - Add
<opml version="1.0"><body>to the begin and<body/><opml/>to the end of the file and save the file - Import the OPML file in NetNewsWire and refresh all subscriptions
Now lets hope that the web interface to NewsGator is as nice as Google Reader
Edit: Hmm, just thought that I could also do this by importing my old NetNewsWire OPML, replacing the NewsGator subscriptions with NetNewsWire, removing all subscriptions from NetNewsWire and then importing Google Readers OPML and merging NetNewsWire and NewsGator. But where is the fun in that :)
