International Free Speech News via RSS/OPML

So my friend Curt Hopkins, director of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, has been ranting lately about how few international human rights organizations offer RSS feeds for their news and updates. This is pretty frustrating, but is just one part of the larger problem of slow adoption of key tools. If group’s don’t feel inclined to start tagging things in del.icio.us, that’s fine – but the least you can do is give me an RSS feed I can subscribe to so I don’t have to come back to your site all the time to look for new items. Because I’m not going to and neither are a growing number of people. Just let us subscribe!

So, for a variety of reasons I’ve used a number of different tools to put together the following resource, an OPML file containing RSS feeds from the following organizations who do not offer feeds of their own, or don’t offer feeds of these particular items on their sites:

Here’s the file: Free Speech Feeds

So you can grab that file right up there by right clicking on a PC and saving the linked file, or holding CTRL on a Mac and clicking on it to get the download option. It will appear on your computer as FreeSpeechFeeds.aspx.xml. Then you can go to your feed reader and import that file to subscribe to the whole list at once.

In Bloglines you can go to “My Feeds” then “edit” and look at the bottom of the left pane to find “Import Subscriptions.” In Newsgator you can go to “Add Feeds” then “URL or Import” and either import from there or just paste the above link right into the URL box.

In Newsgator you are given the option of subscribing to all the feeds at once or just some of them with check boxes. The feeds will be by name in a folder called “Free Speech News.” This is WAY better than in Bloglines, where importing the file will just dump a bunch of ugly URLs into your general My Feeds folder. This is one of many reasons I like Newsgator better than Bloglines! (Go give it a try at NewsGator username: marshalldemo pw: welcome )

Info on how this was created after the fold.

So how was this file created? By using the following tools

  • WotzWot for scraping pages where the item titles are not in the link text directly or where there are several sections of links on the page.
  • MailFeed.org for pages that are hard to scrape but offer email subscriptions. I subscribed to the email updates, to be sent to a MailFeed.org box – a simple way to turn email into RSS.
  • FeedFire for scraping good old simple pages where the text in the lnks mean something useful and there are no other options.

I tried using FeedTier but never got exactly what I wanted. There’s also Feed43 which I haven’t taken the time to figure out.

There were several other pages that I was unable to get feeds off of, they were just programmed too wacky. Should I mention how they were wacky so that folks reading this don’t design pages that can’t be scraped for RSS? No, if you’re designing web pages – please offer RSS feeds for them yourself!

So here’s some cheating type stuff: I opened a new Newsgator account just to create the OPML file for this. I subscribed to the feeds I scraped into that account and then exported all it’s subscriptions to an OPML file. I fiddled with some of the tags in a text editor and then uploaded the file to friendly webspace. It took me a long time to do this time, but it should be a breeze next time.

Doesn’t this make a nice little resource package? The future may well hold lots of OPML file sharing, where various folks offer files that make it easy to subscribe to a list of feeds from the best sources on any given topic. Imagine an OPML file about your home town: your favorite news, weather, events, political, art or whatever sources of information all subscribable as a group with just one or two clicks. Nice.

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