Not Radio

I’ve been getting the exact same thing from the Feedster search engine:

xx.xx.xx.xx - - [15/Jun/2003:15:34:56 -0400] “GET /mySubscriptions.opml HTTP/1.1” 404 203 “-” “Feedster Harvester/1.0; Feedster, LLC.”

Strange, but probably harmless.

I didn’t even think to look at the log files and see what was requesting that file. It’s feedster all right. Scott’s trying to build up his feed list. I’ll bug him about changing that.

Ok.

We’ve been experimenting with this. Just a head request looking for where different aggregators store this. Why? Looking for more blogs that’s all. No personally identifable information is stored. Just parsing it and grabbing the different rssurls for indexing.

This is currently scheduled for a 2x per month run. That’s all. And they are just head requests. We could pull down your rss feed instead and parse that for it if you prefer. UBt that only works for radio users so that’s kind of lame.

Scott

Oh and I turned this off for both of you. If it comes up again its a bug and I apologize.

Scott, I thought the mySubscriptions.ompl was only radio, why are you using that instead of the RSS feed, since you seem to want to work with other blog tools?

Adam, the reason there’s such a thing as a mySubscriptions.opml file is that Userland Cult members don’t know when to stop tinkering and they also worship connectivity. So any kind of new twist on the “blogroll” idea is immediately propogated throughout their part of blogdom. Also, these releases/enhancements are heralded with much fanfare. I’ve previously speculated if radio users could come up with a way to wire an outline to their toilets they would. Then you could parse it and publish a list of people you take a dump with at the same time. It would be the “myDumplist.ompl” or something.

I’m giving them a hardtime, of course. No serious animosity intended. They’re just weird. People like me need to point out how funny they are.

Scott’s grabbing the opml feed as a way of finding links to blogs that Feedster doesn’t know about. I understand that completely.

And some people do post a mySubscriptions.opml even if they don’t use Radio. The opml format has been adopted as a standard way to import and export aggregator subscriptions, and some people that want to maintain Radio compatibility name their opml file mySubscriptions.opml even if they don’t use Radio.

I can understand why Scott is looking for the files and it makes sense, but I wish there was a way to do it without using brute force and just guessing URLs. If anyone has a suggestion, I’m sure Scott would be interested in hearing it.

Can’t this be described as some form of LINK rel=”Alternate”?

Not a bad idea, but you’d probably want to use <link rel=”meta” … /> instead of “alternate” because the opml isn’t an alternate form of the page contents.

The other problem is support. Even if this were to take off, it would be some time before most blogs had the appropriate link tag in their content. So Scott would still need to grab the opml a different way for most sites for the time being.

Excerpt: Not Radio :: Kalsey Consulting Group To the person who's trying a variety of URLs to find mySubscriptions.opml on my...