OPML to Markdown to create a blogroll page

Sunday, August 11, 2024 - Permalink

“Yet another post about OPML / blogroll? But you already automated your blogroll page via your build process” you may ask… And indeed I did.

But after some discussion about to blogroll or not, Steve mentioned on mastodon that he created his blogroll page manually and it was a painful process. As I just wrote my automation script, I thought I could help him automate a bit his process.

After a few emails, the goal was simple: take the opml export file from feedly (his feed reader) and convert it into a markdown file (the format used to generate his blog).

His OPML file use the standard format and looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<opml version="1.0">
    <head>
        <title>[…] subscriptions in feedly cloud</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <outline text="Friends">
            <outline title="title of the feed" text="description of the field" xmlUrl="<url to the feed>" htmlUrl="<url of the web page" type="rss"></outline>
            <outline title="title of the feed" text="description of the field" xmlUrl="<url to the feed>" htmlUrl="<url of the web page" type="rss"></outline>
            […]
        <outline text="Interesting People">
            […]
        </outline>
        […]
    </body>
</opml>

And the markdown file was looking like:

Some introduction text.

**Last updated: <Month> <Year>**

### Friends
- [Blogger Name](https://example.com/)
- [Blogger Name 2](https://example.com/)
- […]
### Interesting People
- [Name 3](https://example.com/)
- […]
[…]

So I created a small (24 loc) python script (opml_to_md.py) to do that:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from datetime import datetime

# Path to the original opml file:
opml_file = "./feeds.opml"
header = "Some Introduction text."

tree = ET.parse(opml_file)
root = tree.getroot()

md = header + "\n\n"
md += "**Last Updated: " + datetime.today().strftime("%B %Y") + "**\n\n"

for o in root.find("body"):
    md += "### " + o.get("text") + "\n"
    for child in o:
        md += "- [" + child.get("title") + "](" + child.get("htmlUrl") + ")\n"

    md += "\n"

f = open("blogroll.md", "w")
f.write(md)
f.close()

Now, he can export the opml file from feedly, rename it feeds.opml and save it in the same directory as this script and then use python opml_to_md.py. It will create the blogroll.md file, with a configurable introduction text and the date set automatically.

Seems it is working now, which is great! One thing I didn’t do though is manage the order of the categories. This script will render categories in the order found in the opml file. I asked Steve about it but he was ok with just copy/pasting categories in the right order, so I didn’t add this to this script.

Feel free to use it too to generate your blogroll page too as I love those! And reach out if it doesn’t work or need help.

Contact

If you find any issue or have any question about this article, feel free to reach out to me via webmentions, email, mastodon, matrix or even IRC, see the About page for details.

OPML to Markdown to create a blogroll page

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