Opera as an RSS Reader

by Balazs Fejes

Abstract

How to import RSS feed subscriptions into Opera 7.5

The recent 7.5 betas of the Opera browser contain RSS reading functionality. How convenient! Now you can browse the web, use email, chat, and read RSS feeds from one application - just like Mozilla :-). It is a very nice browser, and I do like the included M2 mail client's virtual folder capabilities. It's certainly worthwhile to check it out.

One problem I've found with it is that there's no obvious way to import the list of subscriptions from other RSS Readers. Other readers have OPML export and import capabilities. Anyway, I've found that Opera stores the list of pre-configured RSS feeds in the Application Data\Opera\Opera75\Mail\incoming1.txt file. The file format is surprisingly not XML, but something like a Windows ini file. Here's a little Ruby script that translates my FeedDemon subscription list into this format. You need to change the name of the FeedDemon group to your configuration, and run this script like this:

FeedDemonToOpera.rb > (YOUR PROFILE)\Application Data\Opera\Opera75\Mail\incoming1.txt - just make sure Opera is closed during this.

require "rexml/document"
include REXML
doc = Document.new File.new( ENV["USERPROFILE"] +
      "/Local Settings/Application Data/Bradsoft.com/FeedDemon/" + 
      "1.0/Groups/My Feeds.opml" )
myCount = 0
outlines = XPath.match( doc, "opml/body/outline" )
puts "Opera Preferences version 2.0\n\n"
puts "[Feeds]\nNext Feed ID=" + outlines.size.to_s + "\n\n"
outlines.each do |element|
   puts "[Feed "+ myCount.to_s + "]\n"
   puts "Name=" + element.attributes["title"] + "\n"
   puts "URL=" + element.attributes["xmlUrl"] + "\n"
   puts "Update Frequency=1800\n\n"
   myCount+=1
end