Build a Blogroll with NetNewsWire and AppleScript
Well, this post ought to interest at least one person out there. That is if there's anyone else who 1) uses NetNewsWire, 2) Movable Type, and 3) wants a blogroll. Hmm. Anybody still reading?
I’ve been using this thing for a while to build my blogroll and thought I’d share. An AppleScript reads your feeds in NNW and creates an unordered list for each group of feeds (if any), nesting them as required. It supports arbitrary ordering of groups (although this requires specially-named groups), and you can omit groups and feeds from the list as well. The output is a file that you can paste into your web page or template. The script can also copy the blogroll file to the server (using scp) and can run a Perl script to trigger Movable Type to rebuild the page. Most other blogging systems don't need a rebuild, so a simple copy should do.
Here’s the disk image which includes the AppleScript, a sample CSS file, a Perl script for Movable Type users, and abundant documentation. Let me know if you have any problems with it. Gently.
Comments
Would this work with Typepad? I know TP is based on MovabelType
Posted by Tom Roper on November 14, 2006 at 4:26 PM
Tom, I don’t think it will work as seamlessly with Typepad (although I don’t know for sure). The snag is it looks like there’s no way to automatically upload the blogroll file to your Typepad site. The documentation mentions that something called File Manager has to be used for uploading, and there’s no FTP access. Of course, you can just build the blogroll file with the AppleScript and paste it into your template manually. I did it that way for a while before automating the whole thing.
Posted by Tony on November 14, 2006 at 8:46 PM
Hey Tony -
I just wanted to thank you for this great script. I just recently implemented it, and it is working great.
I changed a few things to suit my needs:
- Pulled out the "Save As..." dialog and explicitly specified a path, and removed the post to blog dialog, so that the script doesn't require any interaction.
- Added an ftp command up to my server, and then pull it into my page with php include.
Take a look @ http://okay-plus.com/subscriptions
Thanks again
Posted by Joe di Stefano on January 31, 2008 at 2:44 AM
Joe, thanks for your kind words. I’m glad the script is working well for you, and I love your change of removing the Save As step. It’s good for the first-time user, but gets annoying after that. Now I’m checking out your links. :-)
Posted by Tony Green
on February 1, 2008 at 8:14 AM