Technically speaking…

What are the different ways in which blogroll can be imported??? (Check out this link and this wikipedia link for better understanding about what a blogroll is. )

This above question has been nagging me for quite a while now and this is what i have come to understand about various ways of importing blogrolls into our blogs -

1. By making use of a javascript

2. via RSS by making use of a given URL.

3. via external PHP code by again making use of a given URL.

4. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) link. But the disadvantage of using this method of inclusion, is that recently appended links to the blogroll will not be added to the blog. It has to be later done manually by the user.

Now coming to how one can import their blogroll to wordpress…

WordPress allows its users to import an OPML file. Its quite cumbersome… but this is the only option given to wordpress users.

There are other ways provided to add blogroll links -

1. one way is to make use of the “Add links” option provided in the blogroll editing page

2. and the other way is to make use of “Add to Blogroll” provided in each and every wordpress page. All one has to do is to open the page (it has to be wordpress page) and select this option.

The first method for adding blogroll using “add links” option will allow us to add any link. But this process will not be as simple as making use of either blogrolling or bloglines or google reader

I have heard bad reviews about blogrolling.com, but it allows us to make use of any one of the above mentioned ways of exporting the blogroll contents. And so does bloglines but when it comes to Google reader it allows a person to only export an OPML file.

And because wordpress allows its users to import only an OPML file you might even be interested in using either opmlmanager or opmlworkstation

All these sites allows the user to categorize the links into private or public links. I, for one, am making use of this feature and have added my public blogrolls link to my blog using the “add links” option. And though I am not very happy with this arrangement as it doesn’t exactly serve the purpose of displaying the list in my blog, atleast it allows people to access the list and it doesn’t require me to keep updating the OPML file being used…