Merge Blogrolling list into WP blog
A quick search found fw-blogroll (Dynamic blogroll display) plugin [some of the English translation isn't great].
The instructions are quite confusing:
You need to change your links.php template by calling the functions described below. Then, as usual, you will create a Page in WordPress to which you will affect the links template.
If you want to use the dynamical list, call this function
get_links_dropdown_list($order = ‘name’, $category = -1, $exclude=”)
$order can be “name” or “id”, $category default -1 (all categories) or can be a single category id, $exclude will exclude one category if you mention its id.
Hmmm, it appears that links.php isn’t called by any of the theme’s pages, so let’s just slap that line of code straight into sidebar.php … and that breaks it; well done! Of course, if I’d activated the new plugin that would have helped. D’oh!
OK, so now the page loads OK but there’s no content … but I know that’s because I’ve not imported my blogroll yet. WP’s “import links” says “Go to Blogrolling.com and sign in. Once you’ve done that, click on Get Code, and then look for the OPML code.” That’s easy enough; copy, paste, select category, import … error!
XML error: undefined entity at line 16
Inserted 5 links into category 4. All done!
Looking at the raw OPML output, it’s clear there’s a non-standard character on line 16, c/o the “n-with-a-tilde-over-it” at LunaNiña.com; a quick edit to replace it was a plain old “n” and we’re off again.
This time pointing my browser at the OPML URL doesn’t produce any output at all!?! Ah, but if I view->source it’s all there, so let’s have another go at importing it … success!
So do I need to do this import every time I add a new blog to my BlogRoll??
Reload the blog’s main page and the BlogRoll info is all there – it’s really ugly, but it’s all there.
Update: I did finally discover that I was going about this the wrong way entirely!
