A few days ago, Frank Meeuwsen posted, on his blog via micro.blog, a challenge to show him our blogrolls. I found it via Chuck Grimmett. Frank is a longtime user of my various bits of software, and his blogroll is really good.
His blogroll is of course sourced in OPML. It became the standard for blogrolls a long time ago, and apparently is supported by WordPress. You can give it an OPML file and it will display it in HTML on your WordPress site.
At some point we’re going to ask Frank and others to use the OPML category attribute to put each feed in their OPML file in the bloggers category (and any others they feel apply, comma-separated).
Here’s an example, one of the FeedCorps feeds, to show how categories are used.
I’m going to subscribe to Frank’s OPML file in FeedLand, as Chuck already has. 🙂
Now it gets interesting.
Suppose Chuck also publishes his blogroll the same way, with each feed in the OPML file assigned the bloggers category. And suppose a few other people do as well.
Suppose I subscribe to all three of these OPML files, then if you look at the bloggers category for my FeedLand, you’ll get a combination of all three lists, and whatever feeds I’ve subscribed to individually and assigned the bloggers category.
And because reading lists are periodically re-read and the subscriptions are all kept in sync, my reading list will represent the state of all the reading lists I’ve subscribed to.
Thanks to the combination of categories and reading lists.