“Share” should mean “share”, not “copy”

June 10th, 2006 2:38:47 pm pst by Sterling Camden

My feed subscriptions change day to day, and I’m very bad about updating the blogroll on my blog to reflect that. Never mind trying to keep sites like Share Your OPML up to date as well. That only happens when I think about it. If I’m not busy. And I have nothing better to do. Which isn’t often.

So, being the lazy guy that I am, I just spent a few hours creating a WordPress widget to display a blogroll from a hosted OPML file. That way, I can display my blogroll from the same URL that I gave to SYO, and I figure I’m far more likely to keep that one up to date.

Because you can specify any URL, you could even keep your OPML file on OPML Workstation or OPML Manager if you prefer. It would be cool if SYO also provided an external link to the OPML itself for those who upload the file. How about it, Dave?

It would be ubermore cool if feed readers could use the same OPML file. I envision a special kind of folder in FeedDemon, for instance, that would be defined in an external OPML file. No more import/export. What do you think, Nick?

Anyway, you can see the result in the sidebar on my site.

There’s my contribution to the Grand Unified Theory of blogrolls. Who will take the next step?

Tags: blog, blogging, chipstips, feeddemon, nickbradbury, opml, opmlmanager, opmlworkstation, shareyouropml, sidebar, syo, widget, winer, wordpress

Posted in Blog Blog, Coding...OK?, Too Oh!, Wildly popular | 30 Comments » RSS 2.0

Nick Bradbury says:

June 11, 2006 at 6:25 am

Chip, this is a great idea – and it’s part of what Dave Winer’s “reading lists” would enable (see http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/reading_lists_f.html).

sterling says:

June 12, 2006 at 8:00 am

Nick, thanks for stopping by and commenting. Yes, reading lists would pretty much give me what I’m asking for here. I should think that you would want to keep the reading list segregated in its own folder, so that you don’t have the issues with duplicates mentioned in the comments to your post. I also think it’s OK to auto-unsubscribe when something falls out of the OPML (in fact, I would want that in order to use it as my reading list, but you could make that a folder option.

Seems like ranking could be added to OPML via a namespaced extension. The trick is, whoever owns the OPML will need to apply it, so an API of some sort would be required to update this for a public OPML file.

WordPress Widgets » Blog Archive » Hosted OPML Blogroll says:

June 12, 2006 at 5:51 pm

[...] Got OPML? Chip's new widget is ten times cooler than any OPML importer because it displays your blogroll from a hosted OPML file instead of requiring you to upload every little change to WordPress. [...]

Chris Pirillo says:

June 12, 2006 at 6:15 pm

Could you do anything fun with… http://gada.be/chipsquips/opml ?

June 13, 2006 at 8:32 am

Tres cool, Chris. Yes, if I could, I would use your OPML file to define a folder in FeedDemon to monitor web buzz on “chipsquips”. Right now I already have such a folder that contains many of the same feeds, but I have to maintain it myself. Having gada.be provide that for me is part of what web collaboration should be about.

It will come together. Maybe not right now, or over me, but soon.

Back to school on caching -- Chip’s Quips says:

June 13, 2006 at 2:59 pm

[...] “Share” should mean “share”, not “copy” [...]

Today in Wordpress-etc. customization at inkandessence says:

June 14, 2006 at 4:56 pm

[...] [ ] Shopped widgets from the official widgets blog, found the Category Cloud Widget which I downloaded and installed – it helped greatly to condense our category space on the sidebar. [ ] General – execphp widget is a text box that you can paste php in. Also found King Text – which looks amazing, able to specify conditional statements for what pages archives categories etc. it will appear on. [ ] Links / Blogroll – Linkblocks widget, also King Links. Also the Dropdown Links Widget. I’m already testing the Bloglines one, but another idea is an OPML Widget that reads from an OPML file you upload to the server – both my reader Vienna and Bloglines explort OPML – although of course WordPress Links can import OPML, so I’m not entirely sure what the point is if it doesn’t give you good formatting. I guess it only matters if your list changes day-to-day automatically or remotely. [...]

Dead2.0 » I Don’t Hate Blogthings! says:

June 28, 2006 at 12:20 pm

[...] In order to incorporate Chris Pirillo’s suggestion (see his comment) I found this OPML plugin from chipsquips.� Nice job Chip, keep it up!� While perusing his site I saw he was 46% cynical and I said to myself, “self, you’re pretty cynical, aren’t you?”� And self said back “it’s not so much cynical as it is faced with a sense of crushing realism.”� And I really agreed with self, and that was good. [...]

WordPressed for cache? -- Chip’s Quips says:

March 12, 2007 at 2:06 pm

[...] adding caching to my OPML Blogroll widget for WordPress, I realized that my Tag Cloud widget could also benefit from caching. After all, it [...]