Sharing feeds

Start subscribing and sharing your feeds

Now that you understand what feeds are and you have a feed reader to use, you need to start gathering feeds to start reading. Newspapers, blogs, magazines, or journals — start hitting them all up in your browser to find exactly if they publish RSS feeds, and secondly what their feed details are so you can put them in your feed reader. Now, you might be asking — isn’t there a faster way to do this? Well, there is, actually. A format was developed for people to back up and / or share their feeds all at once. Its called “OPML”. If you had a list of feeds that you wanted to share with me, for example, all feed readers will be able to ‘export’ your list in a format called “OPML”. Then, you could send it to me, and I could “import” your OPML list into my feed readers, and la voila! I have all of your feeds. If you have friends who have similar interests you could share each other’s OPML’s. Sometimes you can find OPML’s that are publicly shared on the web, but these are few and far between (if anyone can tell me different let me know). Sometimes people will also publish their feeds through Google’s feed reader. Share.opml.org is another great resource — but not for finding OPML lists per se. Rather, its a way for you to share your OPML files, and in turn, actually discover what other feeds people are subscribing to, and in turn, who is subscribing to which feeds. Since there is a way to see which users have similar interests you can actually lists from individuals who have a feed list like your own.