Bloglines in PulpFiction Newsreader

Update: I made a little PHP script that lets you upload your subscriptions and will return the converted file. It can be found here.

bloglines is (maybe was, after they had been bought by AskJeeves) a great service if you happen to read your subscriptions at two or more places. Newsreaders get support for their service that allows one to synchronize all your feeds via Bloglines.

Unfortunately, my favourite Newsreader PulpFiction does not yet support bloglines. But while having a look at the services description on bloglines, it occured to me that adding support for bloglines is actually fairly easy: The only thing one needs is an OPML file that lists the bloglines getitems URL as the feed URL instead of the original feed’s URL.

So what I did is write an XSL file that will take an OPML file from http://rpc.bloglines.com/listsubs and convert it to an OPML file with bloglines feeds.

You can then load this new OPML file into PulpFiction – et voil – Bloglines wherever you want it.

This approach, of course, applies to almost any Newsreader that can import OPML files.

Use Instructions

What follows is a step-by-step instruction to get this going. However, I assume that you are familiar with the command line and that you have a running LibXSL, including the libxslt executable, on your system.

1. Download the subscriptions from bloglines and save them as bloglines.opml. You find them at http://rpc.bloglines.com/listsubs and you’ll have to authenticate with your bloglines login credentials.

2. Download the XSL file: bloglines2opml.xsl

3. On the shell, run the following command:

xsltproc -O bloglines-sub.opml bloglines2opml.xsl bloglines.opml

4. Import the newly created file (bloglines-sub.opml) into PulpFiction (or any other Newsreader that supports OPML)

5. Enjoy

Update: You can alternatively skip steps 2 and 3 and use the online script available here.

Caveats

• Because access to subscriptions is based on HTTP authentication, your Newsreader must support feed authentication. PulpFiction does so, as well as NewsFire.

• In the current form, all unread items per feed will be downloaded and marked as read in bloglines. If this is not what you want, change line 33 of the XSL from this:

"

to this:

"

(The parameter n in the xmlUrl defines if downloaded items are marked as read in bloglines or not. Default is 1 in my XSL).