How I automatically create my blogroll

I just updatedmy blogrolland thought that it might be a great idea to share my workflow to do exactly that.

I use Miniflux a lot. Using Miniflux, I read all the blogs and get all the news,get updates from all the YouTubersand even subscribe to some Mastodon accounts ( fediverse microblogs). I use multiple categories to sort the feeds. One of those categories is “Blogs” with all the blogs, which I also list on my blogroll.

The list of blogs I follow is always evolving. Sometimes I find new sites to follow, so I add their feeds to the list of subscriptions and put them into the “Blogs” category. Sometimes I also unsubscribe from feeds when they are inactive or if I’m not that much interested into them anymore (it can have multiple reasons).

To keep my blogroll up-to-date and to avoid having to manually compare and adjust the list with the list from Miniflux when updating it, it is automatically created using a Hugo shortcode .

First, I create an OPML export from my Miniflux subscriptions. This can be easily done by going to “Subscriptions” and then clicking on “Export”. I open the download with a text editor and remove all the categories that aren’t “Blogs”. I copy the remaining OPML code and convert it to JSON using this tool . This JSON I store in a file named opml.json in the data folder of my Hugo -based blog.

In the layouts/shortcodes folder, I created a shortcode template named blogroll.html with the following content:

<ul>
    {{ $opmlJson := index .Site.Data.opml "opml" "body" "outline" "outline" }}
    {{ range sort $opmlJson "_title" "asc" }}
    <li><a href="{{ ._htmlUrl }}" target="_blank">{{ ._title }}</a></li>
    {{ end }}
</ul>

This shortcode is then used by adding {{< blogroll >}} in the blogroll content file.

In the end, all I have to do to update my blogroll is update the opml.json file and update the lastmod frontmatter parameter in the blogroll content file.

Check out my blogroll!