Yahoo! Hacks

Import an Existing Blogroll to Yahoo! 360

Moving your blog to Yahoo! 360 and already have a blogroll? Automate adding blogroll links with OPML and Perl.

A prominent feature of most weblogs is a list of links to other weblogs running down the side of the page. This list is called a blogroll, and they’re so popular that a service called Blogrolling (http://www.blogrolling.com) is there to help people maintain large lists of links and easily include them on their own weblog.

Yahoo! 360 [Hack #61] also features a blogroll and a blogroll manager (http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog/blogroll.html). To add a link to your blogroll, add the site name and URL into the form. If you’d like to add more links, click the Add Another button at the top of the page to reveal more fields. Adding a handful of links this way is fine, but if you already have a list of 10 or more sites you’d like to include, this can get tedious quickly. Luckily, there’s a standard way of exchanging links that can make the job faster.

As more and more services offer the ability to create blogrolls or lists of links, the way to exchange these lists is an XML format called Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML). OPML can be used to syndicate lists of just about anything. Sites such as Blogrolling and the newsreader Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) use OPML to import and export long lists of web sites. For example, at Bloglines, you can subscribe to your favorite web sites to read their posts. Using Bloglines on a regular ...