Google Reader has left us for little more than a month and I’ve not used it since two months ago. At that time, I didn’t realize that some features were very useful to me. I guess I did take it for granted, even I felt almost no pain when Google announced they were going to retire Reader.

Feeds, just like websites and the services, they come and go. I used to check and remove feeds when they had not been updated for very long time. Now Google Reader is gone and there is no places to read such information in the alternative I use, so I wrote a simple Python script to check the feeds of OPML export file from CommaFeed.

The script is called opml-feeds-freshness.py.

It checks every feed and gives you how many days since the feed’s latest entry posted, the following is a sample output:


$ ./opml-feeds-freshness.py export.opml | tee result
192 feeds in export.opml
ERROR http://www.gentoo.org/rdf/en/gentoo-news.rdf - object has no attribute 'published_parsed'
   97 http://feeds.feedburner.com/mnmlist
TTTTT http://rgaucher.info/feed/rss2
<snip>
----- http://blog.mtvmusic.com/category/needle-in-the-haystack/feed/
<snip>
$ sort result
    0 http://blog.flickr.com/en/feed/atom/
    0 https://yjlv.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
<snip>
  889 http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
  903 http://moon-shiny.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
----- http://blog.mtvmusic.com/category/needle-in-the-haystack/feed/
<snip>
1,324 http://www.zzapper.co.uk/vim-tips-blog/atom.xml
192 feeds in export.opml
ERROR http://bash.sidenote.hu/feed// - object has no attribute 'published_parsed'
<snip>
TTTTT http://youtube.com/rss/global/our_blog.rss
TTTTT https://www.ohloh.net/announcements?format=rss

The result can be sorted by sort. TTTTT means possible timeout (5 seconds) or just a bozo feed, and ----- means some issues with the feed, such as 404 or no entries.

It looks like I have some house cleaning chores to take care of.

Appreciation often comes after realization.