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January 9, 2003

Better Browsing Through Useful Software

So, over the course of getting situated back into school this term, I picked up a pretty cool app called OmniOutliner, which I'm using to recap my class notes each night. Among other things, OmniOutliner spits out HTML(that's a sample of today's "Asian American Film" notes) and an interesting file format called OPML, which is for outlining.

It turns out that NetNewsWire also turns out OPML files, and that Jeremy Zawodny wrote a bit of Perl called opml2html to turn opml files like what NNW kicks out into a simple blogroll. So that, in turn, is what's "powering" my blogroll on the right column of the front page. The orange 'XML' image is for subscribing, the title is so you can check out the page itself, and mousing over pops up a description of the item.

If you're using NetNewsWire, you'll need to tweak a few variable names in opml2html. NetNewsWire names its OPML entities with capital letters, which opml2html doesn't expect, so $item->{htmlurl}; needs to become $item->{htmlUrl}; and $item->{xmlurl}; needs to become $item->{xmlUrl};.

Unfortunately, NetNewsWire doesn't dump its opml file with categories intact, so the end result isn't as tidy as it is when NNW's running on my desktop.