WordPress – creating a Blogroll list *from any WP blog* for import

This tip might help you if you’re ever involved in updating a batch of WPMU blogs with the same set of links.

Robert Whiteside at Haddington Infant School is now moving on to using blogs for peer assessment and peer feedback as I mentioned on the eduBuzz blog. We wanted to populate each of the 90+ student blogs with the same set of Blogroll links – one for each of the other P3 students in the school. Although this makes for a long list, we figured it was important at this stage to provide “one-click” access to one another’s blogs.

You might notice that under Blogroll, there’s an Import facility, but no export. This means, unless you know about creating OPML files, you can’t readily just create one “model” blogroll, export it to a file, then import that file into other blogs.

There is a work-around, though, and it’s even more powerful. For any WPMU blog, you can export the Blogroll as an OPML file by simply adding the script name wp-links-opml.php to the blog’s URL. It makes sense – why should you need to go the backend admin tools to get access to data which is publicly available?

An example using Andrew’s Blog:

Blog URL is https://www.edubuzz.org/hip3-8andrew

To export Blogroll as OPML file browse to https://www.edubuzz.org/hip3-8andrew/wp-links-opml.php

That URL should open the XML file in your browser, and you can then save that for future import.

Get overloaded – subscribe to all the Exc-el Post feeds

OverloadIf you really want to do this, just point your feed aggregator to the OPML file I’m using for Grazr and get importing. If your aggregator – like Bloglines – expects a local OPML file, you’ll need to right-click that link and use Save Link As… to save a local copy first.

There are 224 feeds to date, and this file includes ’em all, including some that aren’t yet showing much sign of life. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Link to OPML file: https://www.edubuzz.org/xml/all_post_feeds_20070107_2.xml

Image by tajai.