Using external Feed readers with Opera9

For people who prefer using their own feed readers instead of the one bundled with Opera9 here a small hint that should get this going:

The idea is quite simple: Change the protocol of all the feeds linked in a HTML page from “http” to “feed”. Then you need some way to show you the links to the feeds. Then simply bind your application to the “feed://” protocol in Opera using Preferences » Extended » Programs.

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You can combine the first and the second step by using Martin Dittus’ Feed bookmarklet which renders a list of all the available feeds on a webpage. The problem is, that you can’t tell Opera9 to use a specific applications for feeds, this separation is only possible by protocol. So we need to modify Martin’s Bookmarklet a little bit to output the feed links using a different protocol.

I’ve prepared this bookmarklet here:

Show all feeds

The only difference between the two bookmarklets is this fragment:

	e.href=href.replace(/^http:/,"feed:");

In the original this was:

	e.href=href;

Now all you have to do is to specify whatever application you want to use for feeds using the “Programs” preferences as described above.

Update 1:

It seems like the whole protocol binding process it not completely consistent over different versions. I for example could only use the “feed://” binding while for other people only “feed” works. Please check out the comments in any case :)