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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">