Simon Willison’s Weblog

Better blogrolling

6th July 2002

Stuart at kryogenix.org saw my post about blo.gs and re-implemented his blogroll to update from his blo.gs subscriptions, complete with last updated times. It’s such a brilliant idea that I’ve implemented it here as well. blo.gs allow you to syndicate your subscriptons in various formats, but by far the most useful is favorites.xml, which orders them by last time updated and includes information on the time they last notified blo.gs of an update. It took less than 10 minutes to write a short PHP script to parse the XML and a few minutes more to set up a cron job to grab the XML file every hour. This is impressive stuff—thanks to blo.gs, XML and idea-sharing-via-blog myself and Stuart both have an automatically updated list of blogs right there on our sites.