Inspired by Tom MacWright’s post about the same topic, this is a blog post about how I’ve added a blogroll - a list of sites I read regularly - to my site. Like Tom, I’ve used the same trick that Ruben Schade talked about on his blog, using XSLT, which he learned about from another person he met on Mastodon, who shared a post from another blogger who had written up the details.
There is just so much going on here that I love.
None of this is big tech stuff. We’re in Indieweb land here. Nerds writing about hacking together a few things for a niche audience of other like minded folks, on platforms that aren’t part of the commercial social web. That Mastodon was a bridge in this, that all of the folks writing about this have their own personal blogs, it’s just so indie. Sure, of course, the world of people writing about how to host a list of blogs they read is going to be bloggers with Mastodon accounts. I can still enjoy it happening.
This is RSS world in all it’s glory. It’s a peek into a future we could have had and maybe still can have. Sharing a blogroll as OPML, it’s living format, opens the door to a wonderful kind of social sharing experience. Remember “#FollowFriday” on Twitter? It’s like that, though yes, a bit more raw. That the default format for RSS readers can be used unchanged to share feeds, in a way that both convenient to human and machine consumers, is brilliant. It’s a way of sharing where we get news without adding any extra steps. In a time when I’m frequently asked “where are you getting your news?” this feels like a powerful tool.
Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, aka “XSLT”. What a wonderful and weird remnant of an earlier version of the web. It was the era of XHTML and I very clearly remember having a book on XSLT and getting some very rudimentary RSS to HTML transformations working. At that time I was just starting to code for the web, using the LAMP stack of course, and generating XML then using XSLT to format HTML felt like black magic. It was also completely overkill. There was one real time I’ve used XSLT in a paid project - the client wanted a huge amount of flexibility in a custom theme layer and XSLT provided that. Honestly, it was probably overkill there too. In this case however, in this one case, I think XSLT is exactly right. That the browser handles the transformation and that the underlying format is useful outside of the context of the HTML version of the page, that makes XSLT just the perfect tool & I had a lot of fun re-learning it!
All of that is to say; this site now has a blogroll!