Build a Better Blogroll
Today's exercise for the Wordpress Blogging 101 course asks us to share a few links to the sites we love. As is usual, I couldn't bring myself to do the exercise in anything like a conventional manner – I have created a Blogroll page, listingall of the people I am following at Wordpress so far.
This is where I hold my hand up, and admit that I didn't actually write the page by hand – because that would have taken ages, I would probably have made mistakes, and I would probably never update it.
To combat my own laziness, I wrote a toolwith Javascript to read the contents of the Wordpress OPML export (available from the “Edit Blogs You Follow” link), and turn it into HTML. I really wanted it to grab the blog descriptions as well as the titles, but I forgot about a very boring security constraint on Javascript that stopped it working (if I had used Python, it would have worked). In the end I just sorted the blogs, and plonked them into a bulleted list – you can see the results on the Blogroll page.
Anyway!
If you want to use the tool, I copied it to DropBox, and added a few notes. Click here to try it out.
Postscript – I got the python script working. It's also available from DropBox, but you probably need a bit of Python experience to use it.