Trim Down Your RSS Reading List By Removing Duplicate Feeds
If you have been following RSS feeds for a long period of time, there may be duplicate feeds present in your news aggregator that have different URLs but point to the same content on the web.
This can happen due to various reasons like:
1. Website xyz.com originally had a feed at xyz.com/feed but later moved to xyz.com/rss without redirecting the previous one. You may be subscribed to both feeds.
2. Your news reader is not smart enough to recognize duplicate feeds and doesn’t throw a warning when you try adding a feed that already exists in your subscription list.
How to Detect and Remove Duplicate RSS Feeds ? (and Reduce RSS Stress)
Whatever be the reason, it is relatively easy to remove duplicate RSS feeds from your subscriptions.
The first step is to export your entire feed subscription list as an OPML file. They are plain text files and you can view the contents in any text editor including Notepad.
The next step is to sort the content of this file. You can use the sort command in DOS / Unix or just import this OPML file into Google Docs / Microsoft Excel and use the built-in Sort feature.
If your reading list is small, simple scroll through the list to detect any duplicate subscriptions - if two or more feeds share the same values in text, title and htmlURL fields, that means they are duplicates. Make a note of such feeds and unsubscribe from them in your RSS Reader.
If you reading list has hundreds of RSS feeds, you may like to explore Excel Macros or Advanced filters that can detect duplicate records in spreadsheets.
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hey thanks a lot amit…i have been looking for this for so long…and couldnt find a satisfactory solution for this…thanks a lot!!
Hi, thanks for the post. How exactly did you import the OPML file exported from Google Reader as an XML file into a Google Docs Spreadsheet? Gdocs only supports:.xls, .ods, .csv, .txt
Thanks,
-NKA
Hi, the workaround that I used was to change the extension from XML to XLS, open the file in Excel, follow the prompts, and then I could import it into Google Docs Spreadsheets. But I don’t think that is how you did it, is it?
I wonder if there’s a way to trim duplicate items from feeds.
For example, when Yahoo-Microsoft merger attempt came about, every feed had that news. It’d be cool if there was a filter to read only the first of those news in my feed reader, and skip the others.
Hi Amit,
Why dont you start podcasting on yr blog as well? I do not know the demographics of yr subscribers but even if majority are in India- slower speeds r nt a concern; with wimax testing going on by major providers in India it slated to hit big. plus internet access on mobiles is alrdy picking up speed -both vodafone and airtel promising the 3G iphone will give it a boost as well. Considering these, podcasting can be a easy way for yr fans to get tips from you. what do u think?