If you come here often you’ve noticed that I’ve been writing a semi-frequent series on using the Feedly API with R.

A recent post was created to help someone use the API. It worked for them but — as you can see in the comment — an assertion was made that these items were “locked away”. This is far from the case.

Feedly lets you hookup Dropbox to Feedly. That does a bunch of things, the first of which is that your Dropbox folder (i.e. ~/Dropbox) now has a ~/Dropbox/Apps/Feedly Vault directory where Feedly will store all sorts of wonderful items:

.
├── ? OPML Backup
├── ? Saved For Later
└── ? Tags

Copies of your OPML file (the XML container that has the references to all the RSS feeds you subscribe to) are backed up in OPML Backup every time there is a change to them. I’ve made 127 changes to my RSS feeds since 2014 and they’re all backed up in OPML Backup, ready to be processed with R or some other, inferior programming language.

The Saved for Later folder has a set of sub-directories by year:

Saved For Later/
├── ? 2011
├── ? 2012
├── ? 2013
├── ? 2014
├── ? 2015
├── ? 2016
├── ? 2017
└── ? 2018

Inside each of those annums are HTML files for all the posts you’ve, well, saved for later. The HTML contains the view you saw in the Feedly reader pane.

Astute readers will notice directories for 2011, 2012 and 2013. Feedly was not around back then. So, what are they? They are the “saved posts” you had when/if you used Google Reader (back in the day) and did an initial import from GReader to Feedly to begin your new RSS journey. (Feedly devs are 100% awesome).

Similarly, the Tags folder has copies of the HTML for anything you’ve filed under a tag/board.

So, if you’re not keen on using the Feedly API but want direct or programmatic access to your OPML file and saved content, look no further than a simple Dropbox directory traversal.