What tool would you use to create and edit a blogroll?

[scripting]

Suppose I asked you to create a machine-readable blogroll.

For each blog you had to include a link to either:

1. its HTML home page with the assumption that the home page had a <link> element pointing to the feed, or
2. a pointer to the feed, with the assumption that the top-level <link> element points to the HTML home page.

You could include other data for each site, but those are minimal.

Think quickly -- what tool would you use to create this data file/document?

If this tool isn't ideal, what would be?

[rtanglao]

The ideal tool for me of course would be an outliner :-)

[sillygwailo]

An OPML editor. A machine-readable blogroll sounds to me like an OPML file that I could subscribe to in a feed aggregator that supports reading lists.

[scripting]

You guys cheated! 😀

I would've said other than an outline editor, but that would have given a hint.

I want to see if we can make it work for something like Obsidian or some other Tool for Thought product.

[scripting]

I asked this question on micro.blog --

https://dave.micro.blog/2024/02/08/what-tool-would.html

[cagrimmett]

I answered in a Slack channel, but thought I'd share my answer more publicly:

VSCode. The multi-line edit makes it easy to wrap the URLs in the outline tags with proper attributes to make an OPML file. If I had categories, etc, already in a CSV, I have a couple of PHP scripts that I run to create OPML files like this, which I would then edit and tweak in VSCode.

This isn’t a hypothetical because I’ve been making OPML files regularly for Feedland, and each time I’ve used VSCode and made the utility PHP scripts.

If this tool isn’t ideal, what would be?

A tool where you can paste in a list of URLs on new lines (optionally with comma separated categories) and be given back an OPML file would be ideal. That is what I tried to make for myself with the PHP scripts, but I run it on the command line instead of a UI.

[scripting]

@cagrimmett -- thanks for posting this here.

1. Could you provide an example of the list of URLs on new lines, with comma separated categories. It doesn't have to be long, say three feeds would be enough to create something to test against.
2. We have a list of OPML-compatible editors here, maybe you see something in that list that's familiar and might be useful?

[manton]

This might be a little bit of a tangent, but has anyone followed the Ghost recommendations feature closely? They are effectively blogrolls, and I've been wanting to do something similar. The reason I bring it up is it feels like more platforms could have their own blogroll editor where you select a handful of the people you follow and it turns that into a blogroll. The tool would then add it to your blog and save a copy as OPML (and JSON, if we're matching what Ghost is doing too).

[scripting]

@manton -- this is music to my ears. :smile: