As already hinted at in the Tracking Newsfeed changes post, I have written a small tool that reads an OPML file, reformats it in a reproducible way, and then outputs it back again into the same file.

It was deeply entangled with the greater RSS project I am working on in the background. But I got it successfully separated and put a minimal Amper wrapper¹ around it, which is way more lightweight than a comparable Gradle-based build.

You can grab it here and try for yourself:

1. Clone the repo

   git clone git@github.com:janseeger/kotlin-opml.git
   

2. Export the OPML file from your RSS reader of choice and put it in an empty directory

    mkdir rss
    mv feeds.opml rss/
    git init rss
   

3. Format the OPML

    cd kotlin-opml
    ./amper run ../rss/feeds.opml
    cd ..
   

4. Track changes using git

    cd rss
    git add feeds.oml
    git commit -m "initially adding feed"
   

From now on, you can repeat steps 3 and 4, and depending on the cadence and quality of your change messages you’ll get a nice record of what happened to your subscriptions:

• You subscribed/unsubscribed a Feed
• Author changed the name of the Feed
• Feed URL or even Domain changed
• Removed broken Feed that couldn’t be retrieved anymore

And now?

I get that this won’t fix all your problems, but at least, if done regularly can provide interesting insights into your feed, and if nothing else serves as a nice backup.