I've heard of blogrolls on and off. I didn't really think much of them until recently. I saw Tracy's post on Building community out of strangers. I really enjoyed this post and it got me really interested in exploring the idea of blog rolls. I really enjoy the focus on community and connections. I'm always trying to learn from others and see how I can make deeper connections with others even if they don't know it. It's a different way of connecting with other humans.
I like how Tracy writes what I think often when I read people's blogs
Yes, I want to see what you ate for lunch.
Yes, I want your snarky take on this week’s tech culture kerfuffle.
Yes, I want to hear the song you’ve had stuck in your head all week.
I really want to know what exciting things you are doing!
So I created a blog roll! This is how I did it!
I exported the OPML file downloaded from FreshRSS to convert it to a CSV file. I converted the file and removed unnecessary columns. These are the fields I kept in the CSV file:
- Name of Feed
- Site URL
- Feed URL
Then I used the concatenate feature in Excel. I don't mind practicing the use of Excel formulas. It was actually fun to create and format the links in markdown in the way I wanted. If I decide to change the formatting later, I could always change up the concatenate formula I have setup. I used this formula to create markdown from various fields into this format:
=CONCATENATE("* ", "[", A3, "](", B3, ")", " ", "[(RSS)]", "(", C3, ")")
An example of this would be:
* [Alex Sirac](https://alexsirac.com/) [(RSS)](https://alexsirac.com/feed/)
Which gives me a list item:
My blog roll is available here. I will make it prettier later. I might try to implement a database version so it is easier to maintain. That's another thing to add to the to-list.
