Allan B. Wilson; abwilson@awasu.com
Version 1.0 (first release); 14-Jan-04
No charge for personal or non-profit use. For commercial use, please e-mail the author.
OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files are becoming increasingly popular to represent various types of information on the Internet. As the name indicates, OPML was first used to exchange information presented in outline format. Since it is a standard and OPML files are easy to create, OPML has become the format of choice for things such as blogrolls.
This channel plug-in allows you to specify the URL of an OPML file, which will be converted to an RSS news feed and displayed by Awasu.
Recently Dave Winer, an early blogger and a (the?) creator of OPML, has implemented feeds.scripting.com, where anyone can become a member (free of charge) and submit his/her personal list of subscribed news channels (as maintained by news aggregators like Awasu) in OPML format. Periodically feeds.scripting.com goes through all member OPML files and calculates the Top 100 news feeds, displaying them at http://feeds.scripting.com/rankings. On this page is also an icon with the URL of an OPML file, http://www.scripting.com/feeds/top100.opml, showing the current Top 100 news feeds.
While you can specify the URL of any OPML file for the plug-in to monitor and display, by selecting top100.opml—the default for the plug-in—you can easily see a current list of very popular news feeds. Furthermore, the plug-in makes subscribing to any of the displayed feeds as easy as clicking on the black-on-orange “XML” icon beside each feed name; Awasu will immediately bring up its new-channel dialog for you to add the feed to your subscribed channel list.
This is a standard Awasu channel plug-in. Use it by clicking New Channel in the File menu, then selecting the plug-in (awasuShowOPML.exe) to open it. Either accept the defaults in the Awasu dialogs that appear to see the Top 100 OPML file, or fill in the information for your target OPML file.
In addition to the URL of the OPML file, you can supply
Note that you can use the optional .template file included with the plug-in to simplify Awasu’s output display of the channel and allow many items to be shown compactly. If you prefer, use your default channel template or provide your own specialized one.
You can create multiple channels if you want to monitor and display multiple OPML files.
Each time the channel is refreshed, the plug-in fetches and parses the designated OPML file, then displays as RSS news-feed items its first MaxItems entries.
The xml.gif file is used to display the black-on-orange “XML” icon with each entry. Click on a channel’s icon if you want to subscribe to that channel in Awasu.