In reply to a post by Chris Aldrich
I’ll see you your blogroll and add in images and descriptions as well! … Perhaps what we really need is to give some love to that Link Manager in core to update it to OPML v2 and add in the rel attributes from XFN microformats to the links?
Chris Aldrich
Thank you Chris for pointing out your work on your own blogroll, and how WordPress itself might be of use here.
Adding images is a nice feature. I added faces in my blogroll in 2003, because I generally subscribe to people not sources, and showing them in my blogroll was a nice way to visualise my blogging peer network, and make blogs look more like the social tools they are.
My blogroll in 2003
Bringing that back would be cool. Especially if relying on gravatars where possible.
So if I understand your postings correctly, the Links manager in WordPress also creates a separate OPML file. Now if this OPML file could e.g. be automatically loaded into a microsub server like Yarns, that would be even better. Then it would all be under the same WP roof.
I notice that the Links Manager allows categories and multiple at that, but tags next to categories would be even better. To do ‘Berlin coders into gardening posts this week’ type of searches in a reader. Having all the tags as categories would look cluttered in WP. I have little use for the defined XFN fields, I’d rather have tags that concern various facets of a blogger’s profile (tech, Drupal, infosec, parent, Barcelona, French, Arabic, rock climbing) to enable fast and detailed cross sections of my feeds. Having those tags here would presumably more easily allow me to carry them over into my reader somehow. Basically trying to figure out if WP Links manager could be the source of such data.
In terms of my ideal feedreader lots of the other features could then happen in a microsub/pub client.
One other question to explore: is there a way to bulk load links into the link manager. It is likely easier to build a spreadsheet with all relevant info for my current 200 feeds or so first. Do you add link by link by hand, Chris?
One quick enhancement that everyone can make easily is to populate the element of RSS channels with, well, a description:
Mine says:
The personal weblog of Peter Rukavina, a Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada-based printer, writer and developer.
Ton, yours is:
by Ton Zijlstra
Which could be more descriptive 😉
There’s also an RSS channel-level element for which can be used to include an avatar for the channel, which could be pulled out to use as an avatar in the blogroll. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be populated in many of the blogs in my RSS feed.
‘by Ton Zijlstra’ comes from the blog’s tagline. I’ll see if I can switch it to the notes in my h-card.
Interesting that most of the blogs I follow, the authors either don’t use Gravatar or any sort of “person” image. Many of these follows have never heard of the IndieWeb. My Gravatar image is a graphic.