OPML Renderer Update

20 February 2006

Version 0.6 of the OPML Renderer Plugin for WordPress has been released.

This release primarily fixes some bugs and enhances some functions. In the works for the next release is inclusion of RSS feeds, which would enable feed grazing.

OPML Editor Conversion Updates

11 January 2006

I've added some conversions to the OPML Editor:

  • Convert a NewsGator file
  • Convert a FeedDemon file
  • Import Bloglines, NewsGator, RSS Bandit and SharpReader OPML via URL

Update

Refer instead to my new tool: yabfogTools.root.

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XBEL to OPML

30 December 2005

Here's a tool to translate your XBEL bookmarks to OPML. It's just a quick hack, but it works.

Use Bookmarks Synchronizer to generate an XBEL file from your Firefox bookmarks, upload it, and your bookmarks will be returned in OPML format.

OPML Renderer Plugin

28 December 2005

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.

OPML Pages and OPML Sidebar Revisions

12 December 2005

OPML Sidebar Revisions

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!

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WordPress Comment Moderation Tweak

5 December 2005

This is a tweak to the WordPress 1.5 comment moderation function that changes the pluggable function "wp_notify_moderator" to notify the author of the subject post, rather than the site administrator, that a comment is awaiting moderation. If the author does not have an email address or does not possess sufficient rights to moderate comments, then the notification is sen to the site administrator.

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ftpUpstream script for OPML Editor

4 December 2005

Update

Please refer to this page for a current version and any discussion of this script.

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OPML Sidebar for WordPress

22 November 2005

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 OPML 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.

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OPML Browser

11 November 2005

Superceded. See the Optimal OPML Browser.

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Translating XBEL to OPML with XSL

19 October 2005

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.

* I've been using it for so long I forgot it was an extension! The Bookmarks Synchronizer is a must have extension for Firefox, especially if you want to keep your bookmarks in sync among multiple computers. Basically, it uploads/downloads your bookmarks to/from an FTP server in XBEL format. In my case, the FTP server is my webhost, so I wanted a way to not only keep my bookmarks in sync but also make them available over the Web no matter where I am or on whose computer (or on which operating system, for that matter) I am working.