Yet another blog full of gas
I've been monkeying around with rendering OPML in WordPress. Finally, I learned how to create a WordPress plugin, so I've created OPML Renderer, a plugin that renders valid OPML from any source as an expandable/collapsible list.
Thanks to iconophobia and the inlineRSS plugin for some code and ideas.
I made some revisions to my OPML sidebar hack.
I added a more graceful failure when the checkCache function cannot retreive the OPML file, and I also changed the $maxage variable so that its value can be passed via the function call.
In addition, I changed the HTML output to be expandable/collapsible lists. The javascript for this feature is generated by the XSL stylesheet. N.B. Be sure to drop some images in your images subdirectory and edit the XSL to set the appropriate variables to point to your images.
Most importantly, I've renamed the file from opmlSidebar.php to opmlHtmlXslRenderer.php. Why? Because I'm also using it to generate pages in WordPress!
Please refer to this page for a current version and any discussion of this script.
If you look in the right column running down the main page of this website (the sidebar), you'll notice a heading for my "Blogroll." And if you examine the blogroll, you may notice this little graphic 
that says OPML. That's because my blogroll is being generated on-the-fly from my OPML reading lists generated by PodNova and NewsGator.
Superceded. See the Optimal OPML Browser.
I've been playing with Dave Winer's OPML Editor, and it's starting to grow on me. (Here's a link to my OPML blog.)
One of the coolest things about the OPML Editor is the Map A Domain feature, through which the community server that Dave set up (running on the Frontier kernel) can translate an OPML file to a tree based web site. For an example, see my mapped domain: opml.yabfog.com.
But this is just a prelude to the exciting part: I wrote an XSL stylesheet that translates an XBEL bookmark file (such as that produced by the Firefox web browser*) into OPML. I initially tried to do this (and succeeded) with PHP, but that was a royal pain (and trouble-prone because I was treating the XML as a text format). I had seen Joshua Allen's solution for applying XSL Transformations to OPML, but it worked in the wrong direction. So I taught myself how to use XSL.
I am really pleased with the results.
This XSL stylesheet transforms XBEL to OPML.
And this XSL stylesheet transforms XBEL to XHTML.
Here is the resulting OPML output.
