Keeping my blogroll up-to-date

My blogroll (the list of RSS feeds I subscribe to, which appears in the right-hand column of my blog page) is now going to be more consistently up-to-date. Here’s how I did it.

First, I set up a cronjob to fetch mySubscriptions.opml from my Radio Userland page. Next, I’m using Jeremy’s opml2html.pl script to convert from OPML to a list of HTML. I’ve actually tweaked it slightly since I sent patches back to Jeremy to clean up some charset issues.

I went into the MovableType management UI and clicked on Templates. I clicked on the Main Index template and changed the Ouput File to index.shtml. Next, I edited the Template Body and added a <link> tag to the top of the page:

<link rel="subscriptions"

type="text/x-opml" title="Subscriptions"

href="<$MTBlogURL$>mySubscriptions.opml">

Below the Archives section on the page, I added the following:

<div class="sidetitle">

<a title="RSS channels I read in XML format"

name="blogroll" href="mySubscriptions.opml">My

Subscriptions</a>

</div>

<div class="side">

<!--#include file="mySubscriptions.html" -->

</div>

And that was it! Now my blogroll will get updated daily without me needing to edit the HTML by hand.