… and of Dave …

I’ve seen Dave talking a lot about browsing blog posts via OPML. I like OPML for a lot of purposes (subscription lists, reading lists, almost any kind of list, outlines), but don’t get Dave’s big picture vision yet. That said, I like the idea of being able to include blog posts in an outline, so I wrote a Wordpress template to output OPML for blog post links. You can get the template here and can see my OPML here.

A few notes:

1. the template currently uses the blog’s feed post quantity setting
2. it doesn’t organize the posts by category - it’s basically just an RSS feed in OPML with just the links to the posts.
3. I just dropped the file in my wp directory for it to work. It should be as simple as that, though if the format of it gets more complicated a plug-in might be worthwhile.

In reference to #2 above, it’s not that useful yet, but it’s a start. I didn’t know off-hand of a built-in WP function to loop through the categories of a blog and allowed me to insert code for each record, and I only had a few minutes to put this together. I’ll look around for something that does what I need, and failing that will write one myself. If you know of something, please post in the comments.

I’d love to have this actually wrap the entire blog post in OPML, much the way that Dave’s OPML Editor writes blog posts (i.e. wrapping each paragraph in it’s own <outline> tag). In fact, I played around for a while with making OPML Editor able to post to this blog when I wanted it to, but couldn’t get the XML-RPC calls to work properly (for those who may care, I couldn’t authenticate to the blog, even though I’m confident the username/password were correct), so I put that on hold for a while.

Comments of any sort (including constructive “What a stupid idea” or “Your code sucks” comments) are welcome.