I’m continuing work on my theme for WordPress. Today I’ve been messing with how to integrate my Bloglines blogroll. First I was trying to see if I could style it the same way as I’m styling all the other links in my sidebar. However, when I decided that I wanted my menus to be collapsible, I hit a snag. There didn’t seem to be a way to assign the HTML properties to the Bloglines folders as they were brought in through JavaScript.
So I looked into WordPress’ OPML importer. And boy, does it suck. And boy, does the Link Management section suck in general.
Okay, first of all, it doesn’t auto-create my categories from the XML file. It just sticks everything all in one link category. So I would have to go back through and create all the categories, then move everything where it’s supposed to be by hand (and delete the “links” that had been created from my category titles). Given the sheer amount of links I imported, that seems to defeat the purpose of importing.
Secondly, there is no mass delete option. What the fuck? I can toggle checkboxes next to all links to change ownership, visibility status, and/or category, but I can’t delete all checked items?! Needless to say, I’ve been having a hell of a good time clicking “Delete” and then “Okay” 76 times.
:>
I’d have to go through all that any time I changed my Bloglines subscriptions, too, if I wanted the list to reflect my current subscriptions. Or I’d have to remember to go through and add/delete individual items. Hell, the whole point of using Bloglines for my blogroll was so I’d have easy, instant updating of the list of links on my blog. Using WordPress for this just doesn’t make any sense.
So I’m going to leave my blogroll in Bloglines. Maybe I’ll find a way to make it collapsible the way I want. If I don’t, I guess it just won’t match the rest of the page.
I despise imperfection. I hate not being able to do what I want. But them’s the breaks, I guess.