OPML

There are 36 posts filed in OPML (this is page 1 of 4).

OPML rendering options

Ken Smith posted this morning asking about ways to render an OPML file as a static page. The Awesome Drummer site lists six different methods to do this, I also have a OPML Includes Github repo showing how to include OPML files within an OPML file, and Dave Winer’s opmlPackage has a demo of an HTML rendering of a OPML file.

So – lots of ways to do this task. Ken’s second question was “is one of them preferable”? My answer is “it depends on your objectives”. If you have an OPML file online, and you want to quickly display it using several of the methods where you can just add the URL in a path to an online tool that will display it, and not have to think about it any more than that, then those type of things can quickly take care of your problem. If you want to have control over the manner the file is displayed, or do not want to depend on another online service/tool to take care of displaying the file, I would suggest using opmlPackage or one of the rendering scripts on the Awesome Drummer list above and hosting it yourself. The “hosting it yourself” option can be a problem for some, but is the best way to make sure your file is displayed the way you want and is available as long as you want.

Lazyweb followup – After some testing with opmlPackage, I figured out that I needed to get the OPML of my Zettelkasten file using this URL and then selecting View Source and copying. Once I did that, I was able to process it using Pandoc.

Lazyweb request – I tried converting my OPML Zettelkasten file into Markdown using Pandoc, but got an “Invalid XML” error, because I have URLs within the outline elements. Any suggestions for fixing this? I am looking at opmlToJs to get the OPML in JSON, then use sanitize-html to escape the URLs, then write it back out using opmlToJs. Other suggestions welcome!

Feedback on my zettelkasten experiment

I have decided to slow down my updates on this project, but I do have a few observations. Adding links to the OPML file was pretty easy in Drummer. I missed adding tags to some links, but will make a sweep of the over the next week. I did some re-arranging of categories, as well as added a lot of categories after the start. In the rendered file, I noticed (as well as a reader) that all the entries are fully expanded. I may experiment with trying to flatten the categories. Also, I have not explored using XSLT style sheets to render the OPML file. Still, my biggest benefit so far is that I am now entering links into the OPML file that I would have pasted in some other file, and they are categorized, which helps in navigation.

My Hugo-based zettelkasten site is lagging in updates. I chose to create a single Markdown file for each entry, and I found that it was a significant amount of typing, even though I was starting with text from the OPML file. My favorite feature of the site is being able to view links by tag. I will continue working to get this caught up with the OPML zettelkasten.

Final note: there are lots of good tools out there, this is what I chose to start with, so far it is working for me!

OPML Zettelkasten Update – Day 13

Added over 10 links today for my ZK file, new links in Mastodon, Blogging, and Writing, and added Agriculture and Directories categories. I reorganized the Podcasting section into Resources and History subsections to group the links better. There are 143 links in the OPML ZK, more than 10 links a day on average – wow! I also updated the Blogging category on my Hugo ZK site, still need to finish migrating the OPML content over. Also on the to-do list – playing with XSLT style sheets to view the OPML content by tags. However, the full ZK file list still looks pretty good.

OPML Zettelkasten Update – Day 12

Added over 10 links in today for my ZK file, new links in Mastodon, and added Software Engineering, Programming, and Music categories. I am really working on trying to clear out tabs from my daily browsing by using my ZK, so far I am keeping up!