Soft Machine³ - Arts Tech and Other

I went to add a simple feature on this site: a list of entries from blogs I like. Also known as a widget showing a magic RSS feed. Enter Yahoo Pipes. Should be simple enough, except I discovered that almost every OPML parser in use is broken with regard to google reader. I have many many subscriptions, so I create a number of folders for organization. Because I use google reader as my "master" feed subscription list, I think it's important to get these basic tools right. I'm going to solve this step by step, starting with a better method for parsing the xml, to handle "nested" OPML a la google reader. Folders are empty parent items with a no URL or "type=rss", just "text", "title", and children.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<opml version="1.0">
  ...
 <body>
  <outline title="arts" text="arts">
   <outline text="Civic Center" title="Civic Center" type="rss" xmlUrl= ...

So, to summarize: FetchData & Yahoo Pipes Help are deficient, and all the OPML aggregation examples I’ve tested are broken. They use FetchData to make an item list out of body.outline, so you get a list of “folders”, instead of the actual feeds.