07 March, 2006

OPML Reading Lists

With all the talk about reading lists in the Postgraduate Certificate course I'm doing, I was interested in looking at how OPML reading lists would fit into this.

OPML reading lists are lists of blogs that you could pass between different blog aggregators (e.g. Bloglines). You might want to export a list to a new piece of blog aggregation software that you want to use, or could pass it between people.

If there are several blogs related to an academic subject, a tutor could keep a reading list on, for example Bloglines, for thier own use. They could export the file and pass the list onto students to add to their own Blog aggregator accounts.

An example of an OPML file can be found on the BlogBridge site. This could be imported into a blog aggregator like BlogBridge (needs installing on your machine) or Bloglines (available online). This file could easily be made available through WebCT for students to use, and it could be displayed in WebCT too.

To display your list of blogs in WebCT you can use the following code in a text block on a WebCT organiser page. This links to the list of blogs that I am subscribed to using Bloglines. If you had a bloglines account, you would change 'id=pfh' to 'id=' your own username (note that your username is different to your login name and > or< tags have been changed to ]or[).

[script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?id=pfh&target=blank"][/script]

Thanks to Bruce McKenzie for this code.

In case you are interested in the technical information, OPML stand for Outline Processor Markup Language and is XML based.

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