Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

Suppose that you wanted to display a list of links to all the entries in Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs. Given that there are well over 3000 entries, you would probably not actually want to do this. But suppose that you did.

I've created a file that allows you to do this: OPML List of Entries. To create this, I modified template code from Niall Kennedy. I removed my email address from the template. I also had to add the title attribute after testing with TypePad (see below) to get it to play well there. You can remove the MTOtherBlog tags since that's a quirk of my own installation with multiple blogs. To see my code, scroll down to "OPML List of Entries" here.

So, how do you display this? If you're using Movable Type, install the Outliner plugin. The following code works to create a list of links from the OPML file:

<MTOutliner opmllink="http://www.muhajabah.com/islamicblog/index.opml">
<MTOutlinerItems>
<p><a href="<$MTOutlinerItemHTML$>"><$MTOutlinerItemText$></a></p>
</MTOutlinerItems>
</MTOutliner>

With TypePad, you can import the OPML file into a TypeList. I had to add the redundant title attribute to each item to get it to import the title of each entry, otherwise it came in blank.

That wasn't so difficult after all, was it? If you use Outliner, every time that you rebuild the template with the Outliner code, it will pull the latest list of entries from the OPML feed. However, if you import the OPML into a TypeList, it will not update automatically, you'll just get what is in the feed at the time that you do the import.

Now that I've figured out how to do this and what it can be used for, I'll look into adding some other OPML feeds for Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs, ones that are hopefully more useful than a list of links to more than 3000 entries.

Later: A list of OPML feeds I have created is available at the Index of Feeds.