Saturday, July 10, 2010

Using a news aggregator - conclusion: OPML file ready!

Dear friends,

This is the promised follow-up to my recent piece "Surviving in a world of zombies: using news aggregators". With the help of quite a few of you (thanks a lot to you all!!) and by continuing my never ending search for more alternative information sources I have compiled what I think is a decent list of alternative and/or quality information sources. As I mentioned it in my previous piece, these information sources are contained in a so-called OPML file which can be imported into an "rss news aggregator" or "news reader" (check my previous piece for an explanation of these terms).

Please click HERE to download this OPML file (this link will direct you to the website Mediafire.com and will initiate the download of a file named Sakerfeedlist-finalversion.opml

I want to repeat and stress something important here: do not not in any way 'endorse' the information sources I compiled into this file. In fact, I have included some information sources which I do not endorse at all, but which I have found to contain valuable information as even reading the "enemy's" literature can, at times, be very important.

I would also like to add that if you are using GNU/Linux (as I hope you all do, "corporate IT" or "capitalist IT" being as bad as anything corporate or capitalist inevitably is) and if you are using Liferea as a news aggregator, I recommend that you get a recent version of this very good software (at least version 1.6.2) as the search function has been vastly improved.

By big frustration with my OPML file and with all the news aggregators I have tried is that I found no way to arrange my almost 300 news sources in alphabetical order. That can be a real pain because it makes even a trivial task such as searching for double/redundant subscriptions difficult.

IF ANY OF YOU CAN WRITE AN APPLICATION OR A SCRIPT (awk, Perl, Python - whatever) CAPABLE OF DOING THIS PLEASE CONTACT ME. Please keep in mind that my OPML file includes English, Russian, French, German, and Spanish language information sources and that the file is full of XML tags.

I urge you to try out a news aggregator. Now that you have the OPML file already available, the hardest work is done. I hope that you find this as useful a technique to beat the Imperial brainwashing machine as I have.

Kind regards and best of luck!

The Saker