I have been looking at ways to make my People / Places links on the right dynamic and decided on putting it into a OPML file.
Putting lists like this into standard or semi-standard formats have many advantages. OPML may not be the best format for this, I have seen many people say nasty things about it, but I have not seen them offer alternatives? Further more a number of tools support this format, more on this below. You can grab a copy of my OPML file here.
I wrote a simple parser in PHP using the nifty abstraction layer for parsing XML. This combined with a Smarty template now produce the links you see on the side.
Feedster allows you to search “friendly” blogs by specifying a OPML file, you can give it a swing in the sample below, search for something like “PHP” or “Python”. Some aggregators, both desktop and online, also support importing a OPML file, so it is easy to exchange a list of links to new RSS users for a simple demonstration.
More on this topic later, I am hoping to release the code that generates the side links for other people to use. But first I need a usefull way to pull output from one PHP file into another without polluting the namespace.
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