Using PowerShell to export the Windows Feeds list

Moved computers recently, and one of the things I realised I lost was my RSS feeds list. It was probably a blessing (I just tend to accumulate subscriptions otherwise), and maybe I should be using a reading service of some nature, but there you are.

Anyway given I'm all Mesh'd up, I though I'd copy my feeds list into my Mesh folder (like my bookmarks), so I'd have a backup and this wouldn't happen again. Only I couldn't find where the feeds list actually lives. Instead there's a whole API for dealing with it...

...which is surprisingly easy to use, and works like a treat in PowerShell (I'm always amazed at it's ability to 'just work' with things like COM objects). So I just exported the list instead:

# Dump the contents of the Windows Feeds store to an XML file

$erroractionpreference="stop";
[xml]$feedsListDocument = "<feeds/>"
$feedsList = $feedsListDocument.get_DocumentElement();
$feedManager = new-object -com "Microsoft.FeedsManager"

@"
<feeds>
$(
 $feedManager.RootFolder.Feeds | % {
  $feed = $_;
  $feedXml = $feed.Xml(-1, 0, 0, 0, 0)
  '<feed Name="{0}">{1}</feed>' -f $feed.Name,$feedXml
 }
)
</feeds>
"@

Easy as. The XML it spits out is overly large (since it includes all the article contents from the cache), but for the MB involved it barely seems worth refining it.

Update 2008-07-17: So like the very next day I realised I could have just sync'd the feed list into Outlook, and asked it to export it as OPML. But syncing into Outlook blew my tiny mailbox quota (these feeds are suprisingly large) so I ended up back doing this again anyway. Then it turned out that IE can export the feed list as OPML too (File \ Import and Export - you'd think I'd have noticed originally) - but I still like having a script because I can schedule it.

Note to self: It is definitely time to find a blog that can cope with XML a bit better