Home > Feeds I Follow

I wanted to allow others to find out which feeds I follow, because as something of an advocate for the open web I keep telling people to use RSS, and they keep asking me what for.

It is hard to give sensible recomendations to people with different sensibilities, and feeds can have very different use cases for different people, which is their beauty. Good old user control is always ideologically superior.

RSS feeds are pretty simple XML files, and feed readers, whether they focus on blogs or on podcasts, allow users to import and export OPML files, which are simple lists of links and titles. These allow us to switch clients and platforms pretty painlessly, and they give us ownership of our own data.

I wanted to show the feeds I follow, and allow visitors to sort them based on various criteria, to checkmark those they want to follow, and finally to export their own OPML file, so that they can import it into their own feed reader software.

THe first step is obviously parsing the OPML. I found this wonderful page, from all the way back in 2006: OPML to HTML via JavaScript in Stoyan's PHPied.

With just a few lines of JavaScript, an OPML entered into a text area gets parsed and displayed. However, when I paste in my Feedly-produced OPML, all the categories are lost, and the literal thousand of feeds becomes rather unwieldy.

For now, find a list of the feeds I follow, statically generated and with some text-formatting problems. In the next days (written 2024-08-29) I will properly sort them, add the rest of the app.

More statically, here are my Feedly export and my podcast list.