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Big news: IFTTT has just opened the Inoreader Channel to the public. Anyone can now create and share IFTTT Recipes based on Triggers and Actions in Inoreader.

 

The Inoreader Channel on IFTTT is now live.

What is Inoreader?

Inoreader is a web-based content reader created by Innologica, a software development company from Bulgaria. Inoreader has been available since 2013. Feature-wise, Inoreader goes far beyond the basic functionality of typical RSS readers. What makes Inoreader stand out is the steady pace at which the development team has been adding powerful features, such as:

• Folder export – export your feeds, tags, likes, stars, Active Searches and Saved Web Pages as RSS feed and HTML Clip. An example of an Inoreader HTML Clip is at the bottom of this blog post. It will show a dynamically updated list of blog posts covering the announcement of IFTTT’s new Inoreader channel, based on the web pages that I tag in my Inoreader account.
• Every feed folder and Bundle can be exported as OPML
• Follow social accounts and search queries from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and VKontakte
• Blazing-fast subscription management with batch mode
• Advanced search – search within the scope of a feed, of a folder, among all of your own subscriptions or even among all subscriptions from all Inoreader users
• Active Search – be notified by RSS or by notification when a stored search query renders a new result
• Feed Bundles – create and share a group of feeds that others users can subscribe to
• OPML reading list subscriptions – subscribe to a remotely hosted OPML file. When a new feed appears on the remote OPML file, that same feed will be added to your account.
• Save web pages – store and tag any individual web page through browser extensions, bookmarklets and mobile sharing sheets
• Mail2Tag – each Inoreader tag has its own incoming email address, to which you can send any article or document
• Cross-platform reader, with native client apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone
• Multi-lingual – Inoreader is available in more than 20 languages
• Very active and responsive Inoreader user community
• Outstanding customer support

Snapshot of the Inoreader IFTTT Channel

What can you do with the new Inoreader Channel on IFTTT?

Inoreader offers event Triggers and Actions that you can use to construct IFTTT Recipes. If IFTTT is all new to you, then check the IFTTT WTF page for detailed information.

Triggers fire when something happens in an IFTTT channel. Examples of Inoreader Triggers could be the event of articles being starred for reading later (manual), or the event that a new Active Search result has become available (automatic). IFTTT Actions are the consequence of such events. Examples of Inoreader Actions could be to subscribe to an RSS feed, or to save and tag an article.

Of course Inoreader’s capabilities really start to shine if you combine an Inoreader Trigger or Action with any of the 180+ available IFTTT Channels.

To get an idea of the possibilities, have a look at the 40+ ready-made Recipes created by the Inoreader team (click on the image to enlarge it):

Overview of ready-made Recipes for the Inoreader IFTTT Channel

Recipe that passes articles broadcasted in Inoreader on to Buffer

  Inoreader Triggers

The following 12 Triggers are available on the Inoreader Channel in IFTTT. Click on the hyperlink for each  Trigger for an overview of related IFTTT Recipes and to see the list of Recipe Ingredients that you can choose from.

• New subscription – you have subscribed to a new RSS or social feed
• Subscription added to folder – you have added an RSS or social feed to a specific feed folder
• New starred article – you have marked an article for reading later
• New liked article – you have given your thumbs up to an article
• New broadcast article – you have pushed an article onto your Inoreader channel
• New tagged article – you have tagged an article. You may specify which specific tag is required for this event trigger to fire
• New article in folder – one of the feeds in a folder has published a new feed item. You may specify which specific folder produces the article for this event trigger to fire
• New saved web page – you have saved a web page, similar to bookmarking
• New bundle created by you – you have published a new feed bundle
• New bundle created by someone – someone else has published a new feed bundle
• New Active Search result – Inoreader monitors important search queries for you
• New post in our blog – a new blog post appears on the Inoreader blog

A detailed overview of all Inoreader Triggers is available in the Triggers section of the Inoreader Channel page.

Recipe that saves a YouTube video marked as “Watch Later” in Inoreader, with optional Tag.

  Inoreader Actions

The following 5 Actions are available on the Inoreader Channel in IFTTT. Click on the hyperlink for each Action for an overview of related IFTTT Recipes and to see the list of Recipe Ingredients that you can choose from.

• Subscribe to feed – you may specify which folder the feed should be added to
• Save any web page – you may specify with which tag the saved web page should be stored
• Mark all articles as read – this is a global action across all of your subscription
• Mark folder as read – mark all articles from all feeds in one specified feed folder as read
• Mark subscription as read – applies to an individual subscription

A detailed overview of all Inoreader Actions is available in the Actions section of the Inoreader Channel page.

  Inoreader Ingredients

Every Inoreader Trigger and Action comes with its own set of Ingredients. Some Triggers and Actions have many Ingredients to choose from, some only a few. To see the list of Recipe Ingredients that you can choose from, go to the overview of Inoreader Triggers and Actions and click on the name of a Trigger or an Action. Some common Inoreader Ingredients are Subscription URL, Subscription RSS URL, Article Title, Tag Name and Folder Name.

As an example, these are the Recipe Ingredients for the Trigger “New starred article“:

Ingredients for the “New starred article” Trigger on the Inoreader IFTTT Channel

Why is the new Inoreader Channel on IFTTT so significant?

There are a few other feed readers that have a Channel of their own on IFTTT, notably the Feedly Channel and the NewsBlur Channel. There’s also a generic Feed Channel from IFTTT itself that solely functions as a Trigger – it offers no Actions. The Feed Channel Triggers let you create a Recipe based on a new feed item appearing in an RSS feed that you specify. Note that this Feed Channel does not allow you to create or add to an RSS feed.

Compared to these other IFTTT Channels, the Inoreader Channel stands out because of the broad variety and power of the available event triggers and actions.

As you can see from the sample recipes, Inoreader integrates with many popular services and platforms. The ones I personally like the most are the integrations with the IFTTT Channels from Buffer, Email Digest, Microsoft OneNote, Google Drive Spreadsheet, YouTube Watch Later and IFTTT’s relatively new Do Button for iOS.

Is there still anything to be desired in the Inoreader IFTTT channel?

The Inoreader IFTTT Channel is already very balanced. If anything, I’d suggest that every Trigger relating to articles, web pages, feeds or Bundles would allow optional filtering by custom keyword. A useful additional Inoreader Action could be to trigger a Push Notification in the Inoreader mobile apps, if that’s possible.

Resources

Inoreader IFTTT Channel

Inoreader Blog, @Inoreader on Twitter, Inoreader on Facebook

Inoreader Notebook – freely accessible OneNote notebook with tips, tricks and resources about Inoreader, compiled by yours truly.

Ever since the Microsoft Office Mix team announced that their PowerPoint 2013 add-in was now supporting closed captions, I’ve been wanting to try it out. I’m a very strong proponent of producing videos #WithCaptions and I thank the Office Mix Team wholeheartedly for acknowledging the importance of offering this courteous feature.

When I talked to Microsoft’s Preston Peine about his #OneNoteWithPreston series, he challenged me to go for it with his most recent Office Mix presentation “Class Notebooks with Shared Computers“. It so happens that Preston – through the Mix privacy settings – made the .PPTX source of his Office Mix presentation available for remixing, so I could just download that .PPTX file and open it in my own copy of PowerPoint 2013.

For those with little time on their hands, here’s the end result of my efforts:

Preston Peine’s Mix presentation:

Class Notebooks with Shared Computers #WithCaptions

Class Notebooks with Shared Computers – with captions

Why closed captions?

There are multiple reasons to caption a video. I can think of these reasons:

• as a courtesy to the hearing-impaired
• to support non-native speakers
• to promote better comprehension and retention
• for SEO motives – captions are indexed by search engines

There’s an upcoming movement that promotes video captioning. It uses the #WithCaptions hashtag on social media. For more inspiration, watch the video in this recent Upworthy article Pretty Much a No-Brainer.

The remainder of this post contains notes about my first experiences creating closed captions for Office Mix. I followed the development team’s excellent instructions for closed captions on the Office Mix Uservoice Knowledge Base, basically boiling down to a few steps. If you want to follow along with the steps in this post, make sure you have performed these three:

1. download a copy of the original .PPTX of an Office Mix and open it in PowerPoint 2013 + Office Mix
2. upload the new Mix to the Office Mix website, enabling offline video creation and mobile viewing
3. downloading an .MP4 video to produce closed captions using 3rd-party services

Office Mix Closed Captions Basics

If you haven’t read up about the new Office Mix closed-captions feature, I suggest you read up about it at these two links:

Deliver Compelling Presentations Using Office Mix Slide Notes and Closed Captioning (Office Mix Team for Microsoft Office Blogs, April 14, 2015)
Office Mix – How to Add Closed Captions (Office Mix Team on Uservoice forum, continually updated tutorial)

Closed Captioning feature announcement

Using YouTube’s Subtitle Generator

To create the subtitles, I first uploaded the video version of my Office Mix to YouTube. Next, I opened the YouTube Video Manager onto the Subtitles and CC tab.
 

The Subtitles and CC tab of YouTube’s Video Manager

As you may know, YouTube provides automatic subtitles for videos in many languages, based on its speech recogntion technology. You can read more about this feature in YouTube Help – Automatic Captions.

The Automatic Captions feature of YouTube is the reason I first uploaded my video to YouTube. You don’t have to start from scratch, but can use the auto-generated captions provided by YouTube as your starting point.

Now, although YouTube does a fair job at speech recognition, the resulting subtitles still have to be checked and corrected manually – one by one. The YouTube caption editor is very easy to use, and probably couldn’t be made more efficient. Still, in my experience, correcting each of the captions remains a lot of work. It can help a great deal if you already have an accurate script available up front – in my case, I didn’t.

More about editing auto-captions here: YouTube Help – Edit Captions

A tiny hurdle is that YouTube doesn’t natively support the file format .TTML that is required by Office Mix, so I ended up exporting the subtitles intermediately in the .SRT format. See which subtitle formats are supported by YouTube, and why the .TTML subtitle format that is required by Office Mix isn’t one of them, in YouTube Help – Upload subtitles and closed captions

Converting subtitle file format .SRT to .TTML

The next hurdle was how to convert YouTube’s closed-captioning format .SRT to .TTML, the format required by Office Mix. I discovered that the free video captioning service Amara lets you add existing .SRT subtitle files to imported YouTube videos, and also lets you export those subtitles again in .DFXP format. The DFXP subtitle format turns out to be compatible with .TTML.
 

Exporting Amara subtitles into the TTML-compatible DFXP file format

Two Amara help pages are relevant here:

How to add existing subtitles, captions, or transcripts to videos

How do I download subtitles and translations from a video on Amara?

Final step: adding the subtitles file to Office Mix Online

Office Mix Online requires the import file for your subtitles to have the .TTML file extension. Now that turned out easy enough: if you simply edit the file extension of the .DFXP file (downloaded from Amara) and rename it to .TTML, Office Mix Online will accept it.
 

Office Mix Online successfully imported the TTML file

Have you tried your hand at creating closed captions for Office Mix yet? How did you do it?

“Dynamic OPML Subscriptions in feed reader InoReader
let you automatically synchronize your RSS subscriptions
with web-based reading lists.” (1 / 6)

 

Introduction – from reading list to OPML

This is a long read. If you first want to get the gist of it, scan the paragraph headings and the pull quotes real quick. I hope you return here to find the golden nuggets.

People maintain categorized lists of web sites for many reasons. Combined with an RSS reader those reading lists let you keep track of news headlines and blog posts very efficiently. You may have come across reading lists in the sidebar of weblogs, where they are usually referred to as blogrolls, or just links.

If you export your list of favorite websites in the OPML file format, you can then share your reading list with other people. They can import the list into their preferred feed reader. There are quite a few ways anyone can create such an OPML file. This article provides links to various resources related to OPML, how to create OPML files and how to share them.

“OPML has become the de facto standard
for the convenient exchange of reading lists.” (2 / 6)

OPML icon

RSS feeds for breakfast

Reading lists – useful but easily grow stale

OPML files are incredibly useful: by selecting several OPML files curated by topic experts you can quickly construct a personal news center around topics of interest. Regrettably the mechanism of importing a reading list has one major disadvantage: as soon as you add a reading list, it has in fact become a stale copy of the original. Future changes to the original reading list will not automatically be reflected in your copy of that list. To prevent this, OPML files should be automatically synchronized.

The InoReader dynamic OPML solution

This is where the new InoReader Dynamic Subscriptions feature comes in: it allows you to create dynamic subscriptions from any web-based reading list. When the original source of the reading list is updated, so does the InoReader version.

The first step is to import the reading list using the OPML file’s web address. After that, InoReader automatically keeps your copy of the reading list synchronized with its original source.

Creating dynamic OPML subscriptions

As you can also see from Synchronization option in this screenshot, InoReader can synchronize all changes to the OPML file (new additions and removals), or just new additions.

“InoReader synchronizes all changes to the OPML file” (3 / 6)

If a change in the remote OPML is detected, that event will trigger a notification event to indicate that one or more feeds have been added or removed:

The Memeorandum Leaderboard OPML just got updated.

In my experience adding a subscription is a very fast process. It mostly depends on whether InoReader has imported the feeds at some time in the past. On import, the feed reader checks whether the OPML file and individual feeds are valid. It also checks how active a feed is. Use dashboard gadgets to display lists of inactive feeds and of failing feeds:

InoReader dashboard gadgets display inactive and invalid feeds

All InoReader users (Basic, Plus and Pro levels) have access to the new dynamic OPML feature. Refresh frequencies depend on the user level, from once a day for the Basic level to once every hour for the for-pay levels. OPML subscriptions can also be manually refreshed.

“The new dynamic OPML feature is available to all InoReader users” (4 / 6)

InoReader OPML subscriptions can be automatically or manually refreshed.

Using InoReader to publish reading lists by topic

Like many other RSS platforms and feed readers on the market, InoReader lets you publish OPML files. What makes the InoReader approach different, is that it allows you to make web-based OPML files available for individual feed folders.

“InoReader offers URLs for RSS, for Web view and for OPML
at the folder level” (5 / 6)

You can then share the public URLs with others. This screenshot shows my Note-taking feed folder. It contains 39 feeds. Three public views are available:

• RSS – Note-taking folder RSS feed
• Web view – Note-taking folder HTML Clip
• OPML – Note-taking folder OPML URL

InoReader offers an OPML file per folder

The significance of supporting dynamic OPML

Many people invest their time and energy into building and maintaining reading lists on topics they are most passionate about. It’s sad to see some of these efforts abandoned. However, once the reading lists are published and dynamically synchronized on the web, their authors can now be sure that other people always have access to the most up-to-date version of their reading lists. They will be more likely to keep their lists current, and all reading list users benefit.

Alltop offers OPML for hundreds of topics

You can find OPML files in various places on the web, sometimes deeply tucked away. A large collection of OPML files categorized by keyword is freely available on Alltop.com.

To get started with Alltop’s OPML files, first select the desired topic of interest from their website. There is a convenient full-page overview of all Alltop topics. For the purpose of this article, let’s choose Filmmaking.

A small proportion of Alltop’s OPML-enabled newsrack

The base URL for the keyword ‘filmmaking’ on Alltop is filmmaking.alltop.com/, and the accompanying OPML file is at filmmaking.alltop.com/opml. Using this URL as a template, you can easily construct OPML files built from tons of relevant news sources. Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki explained the feature in 2009: How to Change the World: How to Use Alltop to Add Content to Your Website, Blog, and Feed Reader.

Different flavors of OPML

If you use Google to find OPML files, note that you may also stumble across OPML files that cannot be used with an RSS feed reader because they contain outlines of plain text, not references to RSS feeds and their home pages.

 “FeedShare deserves to become part of the
OPML- and feed-sharing ecosystem” (6 / 6)

OPML exchange site FeedShare.net

Early 2014 FeedShare feedshare.net was launched, a promising web service that is dedicated to the exchange of RSS feeds and OPML files.  Anyone can submit their categorized reading lists to this website. Browse for topics at feedshare.net/tags.

See the screenshot below. This is how I submitted the OPML file for the RSS News Radar project to FeedShare.net. Sharing your reading list with the world can’t get much simpler than this. There’s no sign-up required, just two fields to fill in – a title and an OPML source. As soon as you’ve submitted your reading list, you’ll be given a unique URL that allows you to customize the reading list details and attach topic tags to it.

Sharing your OPML list on FeedShare.net

Shortly after FeedShare launched in January 2014, tech blogger Louis Gray wrote this review: Feedshare.net Debuts for OPML, RSS Feed Swapping.

The FeedShare project is open-source. Original developer Arne @Holzenburg kindly invites you to join the effort and take the project to the next level. To turn it into an ecosystem for developers and users, FeedShare needs an API. Within the context of this article it is also relevant to note that once you’ve uploaded your OPML reading list to FeedShare.net, that copy itself does not magically get updated.

Create your own OPML file

If you have an InoReader account, then you can start creating topic reading lists straight away. Most other RSS readers offer an easy method to export all of your feed subscriptions in a single list. Some will host the OPML file for you through a direct URL, others do generate the output but don’t do the hosting for you. They require that you copy and paste the OPML output and save it to a file on your local hard drive. In that case you need to upload the local OPML file to a web-based file server, for example to OneDrive, DropBox, or Google Drive, so that the file becomes accessible online.

Make sure you enable sharing on your OPML file. Next, while you yourself are logged off from your feed reader, double check that the OPML file is indeed accessible through its web address and test it with your InoReader account.

Tumblr OPML and LiveJournal OPML

Tumblr lets you create an OPML file of your own subscriptions. Log on to your Tumblr account and visit the page https://www.tumblr.com/following
LiveJournal offers the same feature but with a rather significant twist: LiveJournal lets anyone create an OPML file from anyone else’s Friends List. You don’t need to be logged on. Just substitute the username in this URL: www.livejournal.com/tools/opml.bml?user=exampleusername.

OPML reading lists on the web (spreadsheet table)

Update June 9, 2014: You can now your own web-based OPML reading list to the new, public resource OPML Reading Lists on the Web. Note that the spreadsheet has multiple tabs. It is intended as a collaborative initiative. Please feel free to share the link and to retweet the Twitter announcement.

OPML Reading Lists on the Web

What #OPML reading list will you follow? Check the up-to-date lists at the OPML Reading Lists on the Web editable spreadsheet, feel free to add yours!

— Marjolein Hoekstra (@CleverClogs) June 9, 2014

OPML tools and resources

Another way to create an OPML file is by starting with a simple list of websites that offer RSS feeds and using a web service to convert that list to an OPML file. Here are some OPML conversion tools and resources that make that process a lot easier:

• FeedShow OPML generator to create an OPML from any list of web URLs, both from simple links and from RSS feeds.
• Spreadsheet -> OPML Generator to create an OPML file from a two-column Google SpreadSheet (feed name, feed URL). Created by Pamela Fox @PamelaFox
• Generating an OPML RSS bundle from a page of links using Google Spreadsheets, by Martin Hawksey @MHawksey
• Feed detection from blog URL lists, by Tony Hirst @PsycheMedia
• OPML Validator, by Dave Winer @DaveWiner

Once you’ve created your OPML file, make sure that it’s accessible through a web URL.

Create a custom search engine from any OPML file

Now that you know where to find OPML files and how to create and share your own, why not grasp the opportunity and put them to good use? A fine use case for OPML files is to build a Google Custom Search Engine on the fly. Try this TechMeme Leaderboard Search Engine, based on the Techmeme Leaderboard.

Turning a web-based OPML into a search engine

If you observe the URL in your browser address bar, you can easily see how to substitute your own OPML file. Creating a custom search engine is just that simple. A powerful aspect of Google Custom Search Engines is that they show search results from the entire ar