Blaugust 2019 OPML File

Theoretically you can click the following link to download the latest version of an OPML file of Blaugustians:

Blaugust 2019 OPML File

I tend to model my software development life around the Perl mantra: “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.” Thus did I find myself hemming and hawing over the prospect of manually adding a whole bunch of blogs to my RSS feed reader for this Blaugust.

So in true programmer fashion, instead of spending the modest time to add the links manually, I spent two or three or five or ten times the amount of time writing a Powershell script to go to Belghast’s blog post, pull out all the links to the blogs, go to each site, grab the RSS feed link from the header, and write out an OPML file of the results. It creates one big list of everyone, and individual lists for mentors, newbies, and participants.

If you don’t know what an OPML file is, it’s an XML file that contains hierarchical lists of data, often used by RSS feed reader software to import and export lists of RSS feeds.

You should be able to import it into your RSS feed reader of choice. I don’t know what will happen if you import it more than once. I would imagine most RSS readers would be smart enough not to import the same blogs over and over again, and instead only import the new ones, but you never know. Newsflow seems to work as expected, which is the only one I’ve tested it with.

I would go a step further and make a “live OPML link” from InoReader but as mentioned previously, I cannot add any more feeds in the free version. Someday perhaps I’ll write a post about my philosophical argument against paying money to an aggregator service to unlock the “number of feeds” parameter.

I’ll update the OPML file from time to time as new blogs are added.

UPDATE: After a comment by Magimos on the Discord, I changed up the script to use the spreadsheet as the data source. Somehow I had missed the link to the spreadsheet until yesterday. And tinkering with scripts and learning new techniques is fun.

OPML Version History

• Scanned 7/24/2019 9:08:56 AM from https://aggronaut.com/2019/07/24/a-drought-of-silverware/
• Created 7/25/2019 8:50:36 AM from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sD0ebPhY_6vA8BYxu7dA6cQHV0DOS7ve4vRqzKxRNCo/export?format=csv
• Created 7/29/2019 2:34:27 PM from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sD0ebPhY_6vA8BYxu7dA6cQHV0DOS7ve4vRqzKxRNCo/export?format=csv. Massaged some of the input data. FYI the ones with unpopulated xmlUrl attributes do not appear to have RSS feeds.
• Created 8/1/2019 9:00:25 AM from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sD0ebPhY_6vA8BYxu7dA6cQHV0DOS7ve4vRqzKxRNCo/ export?format=csv. 60 blogs counted. Some do not have RSS feeds as of now.
• Created 8/3/2019 10:37:32 AM from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sD0ebPhY_6vA8BYxu7dA6cQHV0DOS7ve4vRqzKxRNCo/export?format=csv. 65 blogs. 5 new feeds added. Some do not have RSS feeds as of now.
• Created 8/12/2019 8:04:10 AM from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sD0ebPhY_6vA8BYxu7dA6cQHV0DOS7ve4vRqzKxRNCo/export?format=csv. 69 blogs. 4 new feeds added, but I think 2 of them are duplicates? Not sure. Some do not have RSS feeds as of now.

Related

• Blaugust Game Schedule
• Blaugust Is Next Month
• Blaugust Performance Self-Review – Blaugust 31
• Battle for Azeroth 119 Update – Blaugust 30
• A Logical Dead End – Blaugust 26