IMS_Blog

Maintaining a blogroll was something I never really had time for. I’d added one when I built the blog but it was really just an almost random collection of links to a few pages. I’ve updated it now to be a “real time” up to date list of the feeds I’m reading. I use Bloglines which allows for the exporting of my feed list. Coupled with the neat Outliner MoveableType extension I was able to quickly rebuild the blogroll to use that bloglines output (when I say quickly, the whole process was quite simple but rather complicated by a Bloglines outage just as I moved from using a “test” template to the live version, which caused some initial confusion). The only tricky thing was maintaining the XFN information in the links, as there’s no way to incorporate that into the data grabbed from Bloglines (it would be nice if Bloglines exported the description you can give each feed but they don’t seem to). In the end I’ve got a kludgey regular expression solution to insert the values for the rel attribute—it works but its not very pretty.