markjgsmith

Hello HN bloggers

Just a quick post to say hi to any folks that might have made their way here from hacker news. Howdy :)

From the linkblog:

Hacker News Blogroll - Someone on HN decided to compile a big list of people's blogs, and they turned it into a website. Someone else created a giant OPML file with all the blog feeds, and I imported the whole thing into my Feedly. It's a bizare sort of mayhem now in my feedly, I've seen english, russian, german and vietnamese posts pass by so far. It's nice to not require an invite, even if it's quite confusing :)

I'm Mark, web developer, blogger, sometimes traveller. More about me on the about page.

I haven't had a lot of time yet to read through the 692 (!) blogs I added to my RSS reader. Hopefully I'll have time over the weekend.

Welcome to the blog, I don't have comments but I read emails, so feel free to mail in comments. #

Bulk importing the HN bloggers OPML

Following on from importing the HN bloggers OPML file, figured I'd quickly document the process.

Here are some screenshots of what that looked like:

A little bit tricky to do from a mobile device. The import OPML button was only just visible on the screen, and didn't appear at all in the iOS app. Importing took a really long time, around 30 mins. I had to restart the import several times, which was a bit annoying, but at least it was clever enough to not add duplicates. Lots and lots of errors, I guess many of feeds didn't validate, or got incorrectly added to the list.

Once all 692 feeds were imported, here's what the combined feed looked like:

The bulk import via OPML is nice but the ability to subscribe to an OPML file would be better. That way when the OPML file gets updated, whichbit likely will, the combined feed in Feedly would stay up to date. Why isn't that a standard feature of RSS readers at this stage?

I haven't had much of a chance to read through many blogs yet. I've been busy getting multi-paragraph linkless linkblog posts working for my static site generator. Oh and installing Meta's new Threads app.

Anyhow it's cool that we have RSS. It's cool that it's permissionless, that you don't need an invite, but I'm OK with having other social media apps too. It's good to have variety, each one has a distinct vibe. #