I’ve been experimenting recently with different wordpress installs so I can play with themes and plug-ins without disturbing this live blog, and I’ve noticed a few things I thought I’d share.

Exporting a Blog

As we all know, exporting the blog itself is rather easy. Under you admin panel, go to Manage > Export and choose your author. Easy-peasy right? This export however will only export your posts and associated media (photos, etc). This export does not include your blogroll / links which usually appear in the side bar.

Exporting Links / Blogroll

It would appear that exporting the links / blogroll is perceived as a much more challenging task. I, like just about everyone else, navigated to the Blogroll portion of the Admin area by going to Blogroll > ? … wait a sec, there is no export option for links. There is of course an import option, but what good is that going to do you at this point?

Google to the rescue

I figured I’d do a Google search. Like anyone else who has tried that search, it yields little results. There is a plugin for exporting your blogroll to de.licio.us, and an interesting post by someone who hacked the plugin to be able to simply export the links in a standard format, but most of the other results were the same kinds of discussions on “How do you do it?”

Results

After digging through the many forums on the topic, I found a not-well-advertised link to a simple page that is already hosted by your blog by default. It is basically:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-links-opml.php

If you stick /wp-links-opml.php at the end of the path for your blog, it will spit out an OPML compliant mark-up page of all your entire blogroll. For example, if you wanted the export of my blogroll, it would be

http://www.kimotay.com/wp-links-opml.php

Interesting. I believe this also serves as the RSS feed for your link list, for those people that like to subscribe to authors who continually update their blogrolls, such as Cameron Moll. His link list is always full of fascinating tid-bits.

What is OPML?

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language which is basically a more specific form of XML for use in structuring data considered to be an “Outline”. For whatever reason, WordPress developers consider a blogroll or link list to be an outline, and therefore, use the OPML definition for structuring the output of your blogroll.

It now appear to be the universal definition for any list of links. What I am not aware of is whether or not Wordpress decided that links should be OPML defined first and the rest of the ‘net followed suit, or if an independent third-body decided OPML structure was semantic for links, and Wordpress complied.

So there you have it.  Hope that helps.