I’ve updated the blogroll on this site to display home pages from my Newsgator Online feeds, instead of using the blogroll link functions available with WordPress. Nearly all of the websites or blogs I visit regularly have RSS feeds, so they make good candidates for my blogroll. I originally thought I could just embed the OPML file Newsgator can create in one of my sidebars to include the feeds; but that method doesn’t provide any folder organization or structure: it simply displays every feed in alphabetical order. It also makes excluding feeds a little complicated, because they have to be manually removed from the OPML file. And adding new feeds means recreating the OPML file and updating the sidebar — something I wanted to avoid, since I’m a bit (!!) of a feed junkie.

The method I came up with takes advantage of the ability to create custom feed “locations” in Newsgator. Individual feeds can be associated with any (and multiple) locations, and Newsgator provides a script that, once embedded in a WordPress file, displays all the links associated with that location.

Here’s how my feeds are organized in Newsgator. As you can see, I have numerous folders, each with multiple feeds.

I created a separate Newsgator location for each folder, then associated that folder’s feeds with the location. It may sound a little complicated, but it’s really not, and offers several conveniences for maintaining the blogroll that make it worth setting up.

Below are the steps you can follow to do the same thing. In this example, I’m creating a blogroll for the feeds listed in the “Science and Nature” Newsgator folder.

1. Select “Settings” on the Newsgator Online menu bar.

2. Select the “Edit Locations” tab.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the display and enter the name you want to assign to this location in the “Create location” box. (I use “Blogroll” plus the folder names for the location names; but since there is no technical relationship between the folder and location names, you can call them anything you want.) After typing in a name, press “Add.”

4. Scroll down to the location you just created. On the left of the screen, you will see “New subscriptions will be automatically added to this location. Click to change.” Click the underlined text then scroll back down to the location if necessary. You will now see “New subscriptions will NOT be automatically added to this location.” Changing this option ensures that feeds aren’t associated with the blogroll whenever you subscribe to a new one.

5. Select “Feeds” and then select “Uncheck all” on the Edit Location display. Then scroll around and select the feeds you want to associate with this location. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the display and select “Update”.

6. When Edit Locations reappears, scroll to your new location again, and select “Blogroll”. Click the check box to the left of “Click here to enable Blogroll settings for this location.”

7. In the box toward the bottom of the screen, you will see this:

   <a href=”$xmlurl$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a><br/>

   “$xmlrul$” directs the script to the RSS link for the feeds. Change it to “$link$” so that the generated links point to the feeds’ websites (home pages) rather than the RSS links. It should look like this after you make your changes:

   <a href=”$link$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a><br/>

   You can also format the links by making changes to this line of code. By default, a single blank line (<br/>) will be inserted after the link when it appears on your blogroll. In my case, it was more appropriate to format the links as list elements, with the <li> and </li> tags, like this:

   <li><a href=”$link$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a></li>

   Once you’ve made the changes you want, scroll down and select “Save Changes.” Scroll back to the location, once again select “Blogroll” and leave the window or tab open for now.

8. In a new browser window or tab, log on to your WordPress blog, select the Presentation tab, then the Theme Editor tab. Select the theme file where you will want the blogroll to appear from the files on the right; in my case, I updated sidebar.php so the blogroll appears in the column next to my posts.

9. Scroll to the area where you will want the blogroll to be displayed, and insert the following four lines of code (line three is a blank line):

   <h2><?php_ e(’Science and Nature’); ?></h2>
   <ul>

   </ul>

   “Science and Nature” will be formatted with the heading level 2 style because of the <h2> and </h2> tags.

10. Return to the Newsgator tab or window you left open earlier, and copy the script to the blank link in the code above.  The result will look like this:

    <h2><?php_ e(’Science and Nature’); ?></h2>
    <ul>
    <script src=http://services.newsgator.com/
    ngws/Blogroll.aspx?uid=nnnnnn&mid=##></script>
    </ul>

    (Note that “nnnnnn” will contain your Newsgator subscriber number, and “##” will contain a number associated with the location.)

    Select “Update File” to update your WordPress file.

Display your site, and the feeds associated with the location you created in Newsgator will now show under the heading you specified above (in my case, “Science and Nature”). All of the headings and links in my blogroll were created by following this procedure.

Any time you unsubscribe from a Newsgator feed, the link will no longer appear in your blogroll. If you move a feed to another folder and want that reflected in your blogroll, you will need to clear the check box for the feed in the old location and check it in the new location (which is still less work than updating links in WordPress). Similarly, to add a new feed to your blogroll (since you deselected automatic addition of new subscriptions), follow the same procedure: access the location where you want it to appear, and click the checkbox.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Blogging, Site Updates, Blogrolling. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.