Blog of the week – 2005.49

December 3, 2005 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

I left myself a note (I do this more often than you’d think!) to remind myself to check out my BlogRolling list (which is in the sidebar of the current layout – more about that in another post) … so I’m reading down the list and I’ve realised that quite a few of them could be dropped because either they never update, or I read them through another route (e.g. LiveJournal, RSS), or I just don’t follow the site anymore. So it’s time for some pruning….

You know, there really should be a nice tool to manage blogrolls – one where you can drag & drop sites (OK, their URLs) to change their order within the list … and show a snaphot/thumbnail of the site as a reminder for us forgetful folks … and of course requirement #1 for all software is it should be free

Ah, but of course the blogroll is really just an OPML file, so I wonder if there’s a pretty OPML manager out there? … Yes! There’s Dave Winer’s OPML Editor (for Windows or Mac) and a pair of sites called OPML Browser and OPML Manager. [Goes off to ~~play with~~ evaluate them.]

Hmmm, well OPML Manager doesn’t seem to want to play (using Opera or Firefox), and after downloading the Windows app from OPML Browser I discovered it’s just a browser linked to OPML Manager and therefore also doesn’t work (because there’s no data to view, because it won’t upload it).

Dave Winer’s OPML Editor, on the other hand, opened my BlogRoll OPML file just fine! Trouble is, because it’s a generic OPML editor, it doesn’t do the clever stuff I’d like to see (site thumbnails, date last updated) but it’s OK for sorting the order out. (I did a test import back into my BlogRolling list and it worked fine, so it’s looking good so far.)

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about this week’s Blog Of The Week, so … well, as much as I enjoy Rick Mercer’s Blog he’s a celeb so I’ve decided he’s ineligible, so … this week’s BotW is … [drum roll please] … “6000 miles from civilisation“, written by a Brit living in South Africa – this way everyone who cringes everytime I mention how much I love winter/snow can go to his blog and watch the webcam of summer in Cape Town.

Edited to add: I tend to use a unique email address for each site I visit, so I can track where spam comes from and never use them again. Guess what – I’ve been getting spam from the email address I used with OPML Manager, so my advice is don’t use their site – not only does it not work, but you’ll be spammed too. Lovely. Thanks guys.