Sharing and Backing Up Feed Lists with OPML

There’s a specific moment of panic that many people experience at some point. You’ve spent months, maybe years, carefully curating a list of RSS feeds that you actually want to read. You’ve found the right balance between news, deep technical articles, and the occasional fun distraction. Then something happens. Your device dies, you switch apps, or you just want to share your collection with a friend who asked where you find such good content.

This is where OPML files save the day.

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language. It’s an XML-based format that was originally designed for outlining tools, but the RSS community adopted it as the standard way to export and import feed subscriptions. Think of it as a plain text backup of every feed you subscribe to, along with how you’ve organized them into folders or categories.

Every decent RSS reader should support OPML export and import. If yours doesn’t, that might be a sign to look elsewhere. The format itself is straightforward enough that you can open it in a text editor and read it like any other file. Each feed appears as an entry with its title and URL, and you can nest them inside outline tags to preserve your folder structure.

The backup aspect alone makes OPML worth understanding. Imagine spending hundreds of hours discovering great blogs, niche newsletters that publish via RSS, and YouTube channels that post consistently. Losing that work because a service shutdown or account issue wipes everything would be devastating. With an OPML file, you have a portable snapshot of your entire reading ecosystem. You can store it in cloud storage, email it to yourself, or keep it on a USB drive somewhere. When disaster strikes, you’re not starting from zero.

Sharing is the other big use case. I have a few friends who are always asking me how I find so many interesting articles. Instead of sending them individual links one at a time, which quickly becomes tedious, I can export my curated tech feeds as an OPML file and send it over. They import it into their reader and instantly have access to the same sources I’ve been reading for months. Of course, they’ll want to adjust things to match their own interests, but it gives them a head start instead of staring at an empty feed list wondering where to begin.

There’s also something valuable about maintaining public OPML lists for specific communities. Some people put together carefully curated collections for topics like cybersecurity, indie development, or climate science. These lists get passed around on forums and social media, giving newcomers a trusted starting point rather than having to wade through search results and hope they find quality sources.

Finding these lists requires a bit of searching, but repositories like GitHub have plenty of them. People share their personal OPML files as public gists or in dedicated repos. You can browse them, see how others organize their feeds, and even borrow entire categories that look interesting. It’s a bit like getting a reading recommendation from someone whose taste you trust, except instead of a few blog titles scrawled on a napkin, you get a complete structured list ready to import.

The import process varies by reader, but it’s usually straightforward. Most apps have an “Import OPML” option somewhere in settings. You upload the file, and within seconds your feed list is populated. The beauty of this system is that it works across different readers. I’ve switched between several RSS applications over the years, and each time the transition was smooth because I could export from the old one and import into the new one.

One thing to keep in mind is that OPML preserves your feed structure but not your read state. When you import a list into a new reader, everything will show up as unread. This can be overwhelming if you’re importing a large collection, especially if some of those feeds update frequently. I usually deal with this by importing the list, then marking everything as read to start fresh. Any genuinely important articles will surface again as new posts arrive.

Another consideration is feed health. When you share an OPML file, some of those feeds might have stopped updating or moved to new URLs. It’s worth doing a quick audit after importing, either by checking which feeds haven’t posted in a long time or by using reader features that flag dead feeds. This cleanup step keeps your imported list healthy and prevents you from subscribing to sources that no longer produce content.

For those who want to get more technical, OPML files are human-readable XML. If you’re comfortable editing text files, you can manually add or remove feeds, reorganize categories, or even write scripts to generate custom OPML files programmatically. This opens up possibilities for automating feed discovery or maintaining specialized lists for different purposes.

The format has been around since the early days of RSS, which means it’s well-established and unlikely to disappear. Any tool that works with RSS feeds understands OPML. This longevity gives you confidence that your backups will remain usable years from now, regardless of which reader you end up using.

I recommend making OPML export part of your regular maintenance routine. Once a quarter, export your feed list and save it somewhere safe. It takes seconds, and having that backup on hand means you’re always one import away from recovering your entire reading setup. It’s a small habit that provides disproportionate peace of mind.