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Thursday, February 23, 2006
WPMail Smart Groups does not support auto discovery or OPML import
I fear I’m starting to sound like a complainer, which I try not to be. So, to whoever reads this, please take it as, at worst, disappointment, and at best, a suggestion to Corel.
One of the features of WordPerfect Mail is its ability to deliver RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. For my purposes, RSS is basically another way for getting content onto and off of the internet.
"Smart Groups" is what Corel has labeled the part of WPMail that handles RSS feeds. A minor point, but I think "News Reader" or "News Subscriptions" would have been better names. As someone who reads a lot of RSS feeds, "smart groups" has no meaning. I mention this only because it may confuse a lot of people.
WPMail came pre-installed with the RSS feed for CNET News.com. That's fine and good, but, I want more.
Right clicking on "Smart Groups," I’m able to select New Smart Group.... That takes me to the Smart Groups Wizard. There, I’m met with a choice between RSS feed or Mailing List. I have not yet checked out the Mailing List options.
Clicking RSS feed, I’m presented with a selection of popular feeds to choose from. There are 11 predefined choices, including Yahoo! News, CBS Market Watch, and movie reviews by Roger Ebert, to name a few. Slim pickins', to say the least. However, I wouldn't want any newsreader to have predefined choices of the millions of RSS feeds currently available.
There is one more choice after the end of the predefined choices. That is Custom RSS feed. There I can manually enter a URL for a particular feed.
This is fine for adding an occasional feed here and there, but it's a slow and cumbersome way to load a lot of feeds into a feed reader. And, as we know, I want more. I’m sort of embarrassed to say how many different feeds I read on a regular basis, so just suffice it to say that I read a lot. A real lot.
In additional to manually entering feeds into a newsreader, there are two other generally recognized methods.
One of those methods is referred to as "auto discovery." When someone goes to a web site that has an RSS feed with auto discovery enabled, his newsreader should have some way of alerting him of the RSS feed and providing a way to subscribe to it, if desired. WordPerfect Mail does not support auto discovery.
The other method is OPML import. At least, that's what I call it. OPML is short for Outline Processor Markup Language. That's a file format like .WPD or .PDF are file formats. So, I have an outline of all my RSS subscriptions in a file called, "marie_feeds.opml. I should be able to import my OPML file into any feed reader and generate a list of my feeds. Unfortunately, WordPerfect Mail Smart Groups does not support OPML import.
Both auto discovery and OPML import have been around for a couple years, now. As such, there's really no good reason for excluding both of these technologies from a newsreader today.
Corel, please implement these two technologies in WPMail. The sooner, the better. Until then, WPMail is out as a feed reader.
• Posted by: Marie Carnes at 07:53 PM
• 538 words in this article
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• Filed in: WPMail
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