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Google Spreadsheets, CSV, Venus

Stefan Tilkov,

Sam Ruby:

You start with a spreadsheet. You can control who has access to this spreadsheet. One row per subscription. Columns can be the name of the feed, configuration items, or anything that may appear in a template. For example, hackergotchi icons.

Sam shows how to use Google spreadsheets to maintain a list of feeds that is included in the Planet-derived Venus aggregator. Insanely cool — and all done with good old-fashioned CSV (and none of this fashionable Atom stuff Sam must have heard of …

On August 5, 2007 11:21 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis said:

Hehe. Well, that’s one use case where I think Atom isn’t the best choice. Times and half a time ago, we had a few long conversations on Uche Ogbuji’s weblog about managing bookmark lists, and we came to the conclusion that employing Atom for the purpose is doable but awkward. The consensus came down to XBEL; it led to thoughts of reviving that spec effort to move things forward, whereupon there was a brief flare of discussion on a newly created list for the vocabulary…

… and then radio silence.

I’m still unhappy that everyone uses OPML for the purpose. CSV may not even be XML, but hey, at least it’s not OPML.