OPML, the feed of feeds.  Really.  I recently got a chance to work with opml, and I was bored on a sunday night, so I thought I would share with you a couple of thing I observed. 

First off the link:

opml and asp.net – That helped with parsing the opml file and getting a dataset from it. 

OPML files for the most part have a simple layout.  <outline> tags that hold attributes for the feeds type, xml link, site link, and title.  You can add a couple more things, but really that is basically what you will see in every opml file.  

According to opml.org the goal of opml is:

 The purpose of this format is to provide a way to exchange information between outliners and Internet services that can be browsed or controlled through an outliner.

OPML is also the file format for an outliner application, which is why OPML files may contain information about the size, position and expansion state of the window the outline is displayed in. 

I’m not really sure what they mean by that, but I do know that opml is the way to import / export / transfer subscription lists.  And since the web is crazy with subscriptions these days, opml is found in most feed readers.  So if you are writing a feed reader, you should have it on your feature list.

Well opml is really no more complex then that.  So I’m going to get back to coding…

Ok, so this is my first day with evernote, but I like it a lot so far.  The idea of Evernote is to store all your notes online and to be your remote brain.  To that end you can store text and images (including uploads from camera phones, and your builtin web cam)  it will then store that data, and run a OCR against it to make the images searchable.  Another part where evernote excels is the ability to access your notes from a web browser, mac and pc clients, pocket pc client, and a soon promised iphone client.  Never be without your data, access and search it from anywhere.  

So moving beyond Evernote to the rest of my setup.  I have the HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One.  I have had trouble with the included windows software.  You should be able to press scan to on the HP and have the image that you are scanning sent straight to a computer.  Well, the windows software never did work, it just always crashed as I tried to configure it.  But that is not the case with the Mac version, which is awesome.  So I installed that, and set it up to be able to send the image directly to Evernote.  Now from my scanner I can press “Scan To” and select “Evernote”  which will transfer the image to my laptop, which will send it to evernote all without pressing any more buttons. Then I can search and access that scanned document with Evernote at anytime from anyplace on just about any device.  Awesome.