Backpack, Sqeet and RSS feeds

While playing with Backpack, I came across this posting on caching RSS feeds on Backpack. It turns out that Squeet serves up items from your RSS feeds into your in-box at a pre-designated time. It also gives you the ability to pause and resume feed delivery.

Squeet also lets you import your favorite RSS subscriptions as an OPML file. Stoked at this discovery, I exported my Google Reader feeds as OPML, imported them into Squeet and proceeded to examine the resulting OPML file.

I was shocked to discover that most of my feeds were listed multiple times in the Squeet reader. It turns out that in Google Reader, a tag is a top-level outline and it's children are the feeds that are tagged with that attribute. So the same feed would be listed multiple times, if it were tagged with multiple attributes.

For e.g. Adam Bosworth shows up both in distributed systems as well as blog

<outline title="distributed-systems" text="distributed-systems">
<outline text="Adam Bosworth's Weblog" title="Adam Bosworth's Weblog" type="rss" xmlurl="http://www.adambosworth.net/index.rdf" htmlurl="http://www.adambosworth.net/">


<outline title="blog" text="blog">
<outline text="Adam Bosworth's Weblog"
title="Adam Bosworth's Weblog" type="rss"
xmlUrl="http://www.adambosworth.net/index.rdf" htmlUrl="http://www.adambosworth.net/"/>

The Squeet OPML import utility, which seems to ignore the tags, parses this as two (or N) distinct feeds. It would be nice if the import utility detected duplicates.

Fearing the deluge awaiting my inbox tomorrow morning, I looked for a way to delete the duplicates. I could export the Squeet feeds as OPML (thereby elminating the tag nesting), transform the OPML file and import it again. But, Squeet doesn't allow for an imported OPML file to over-write the current subscriptions.

So it was that I spent a good deal of time clicking (and confirming) each delete..

Coming back to Backpack, the actual coolness of the original post is that you can direct the periodic Squeet e-mail of your RSS items to the unique e-mail of a Backpack page you can set-up as your feed cache. Since I have a large set of subscriptions, a better idea would be to let the feeds get served into my inbox, and selectively forward interesting posts to the Backpack page to be cached.

In any case, I'm happy to see my RSS feeds in my inbox, and not have to go to a separate feed portal. Another way to do this is to use Mihai Parparita's Greasemonkey script to get my feeds in my GMail in-box, but the Backpack solution lets you archive the feeds as well, an useful third dimension.