Blogroll autodiscovery

20 Jun 2003

In order to find new feeds to index, Feedster is making some requests to URLs where OPML files are commonly located. A short discussion ensued in my comments about the relative merits of Feedster’s approach and a better way of finding the files.

A comment by Phillip Harrington suggested that bloggers use a <link> tag to indicate the location of their OPML files if they wish for them to be public.

Not only would this benefit Feedster, but it could also help automated systems look for related blogs. As I visit sites, my news aggregator could keep track of blogs that are subscribed to the same feeds as me. As the aggregator finds feeds that are often found in proximity to ones I like, they could be automatically added to my aggregator. Sort of like FOAF for blogrolls and news aggregators.

The format for such a link tag would be: <link rel="meta" type="application/opml+xml" title="OPML" href="http://yoururl.com/path/to/yoursubscriptions.opml">

dwight
June 21, 2003 6:12 AM

At the risk of starting another discussion on prior art, Radio Userland inserts a tag of this form (take a look at the source for http://www.scripting.com ):

Adam Kalsey
June 21, 2003 7:01 AM

Well, then nevermind… :)

That tag would work, although I’m not thrilled about the “subscriptions” part. There’s nothing about OPML that says it can’t be used for other things as well (like a blogroll).

dwight
June 22, 2003 7:39 AM

Oh, I should clarify. This opml file specifically describes the rss subscriptions for Radio Userland. I would assume that if you wanted to list your blogroll, then you would use rel=”blogroll” in the tag.

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