Somehow in the last few days, my Liferea program ate the OPML file that lists all the feeds it aggregates. I think I have a backup, but the disk is at my office. So with some quick thinking, some useful little Fedora utilities, and a modicum of organizational sense, I was able to reconstruct everything. (I even made a few slight improvements to suit the reading habits I’ve developed.)
To do this, I used xmlstarlet to pull out the value of the feedSource element from each of the active feeds in my Liferea cache — inexplicably left behind in the swathe of destruction — and write them to a file. Then I installed Dogtail, and proceeded to fight tooth and nail with GNOME AT (assistive technologies), which for some odd reasons hangs my GNOME session when I log in. (If anyone has a tip on that part, please let me know — AT is required for Dogtail.) If I killed the at-spi-registry process my session could proceed fairly normally. Yeah, it’s a mystery to me.
I used Dogtail to record myself adding a feed, and then I edited the resulting Python script to automate adding all the feeds in my results file from above. Then I could simply set up folders, and edit the OPML file by hand to organize the feeds. I had to breeze over the feeds to make sure I hadn’t missed anything really important in the last few days, but all in all, time well spent.