I often don’t know what I don’t know. Ben Harwood posed a question this morning

Basically to export the sites you have in a Feed WordPress site, all you need to do is export the WordPress links, that us a kind of data originally built into the software when people were big on doing these things called blogrolls (a list of recommended blogs).

Links are a useful thing I have used time to time to built collections of sites, you can put them in categories and use widgets/shortcodes to push them to your site. On the bottom right of my site are two widgets to list sites “other webs” and “stuff I’ve made”; these are generated from the link structure. Rather than manually enter URLs in an editor, I put them in the links, create a category, and wham! I can tell wordpress to display all links in the “stuff I’ve made” category.

Well Feed WordPress stores all of the sites you add to it as links too. It stuff a bunch of other data in the notes field.

And 1-2-3 Google it and I found that WordPress has a built in way to export those links and then re-import them into another site. You can see this in action just by taking wp-links-opml.php on the end of the home url of a WordPress site, so you can see all the ones for Connected Courses by going to http://connectedcourses.net/wp-links-opml.php.

wplinks-opml

If you look at the OPML (yep that’s bare code, all angle brackets and stuff), I notice it organizes them into categories, and if you have been following the Feed WordPress 101 series, you might remember that Feed WordPress stores all of its feeds in a Link Category named Contributors

You can then use the WordPress Import tools to bring those into another site.

Now I have already built a custom coded bit into the Connected Courses site to generate an OPML file for all syndicated sites (see right side of http://connectedcourses.net/all-blogs/). I am thinking that is still better than this WordPress thing, (on a quick check, I see duplicates or inactive feeds). I hope when I get in one place to turn my custom code into a plugin.

But this WordPress OPML-links tool might help Ben in a pinch.

If this kind of stuff has value, please support me by tossing a one time PayPal kibble or monthly on Patreon
Become a patron at Patreon!
Profile Picture for cogdog
An early 90s builder of the web and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person.

Comments

  1. Just letting you know I’ve used this twice in the last few days and it saved me all kinds of hassle. Keep on making the world a better place.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *