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26 07 2007

Outlook RSS Feeds to HTML Blogroll

Posted by Stefan Stranger in General

I wanted to update my blogroll on my weblog but because I’m subscribed to quite some rss feeds I did not wanted to do this manually. There had to be an easier way to do this. And I was correct, after doing some Googling I found out that you could use XSL transformation to convert OPML to HTML. But I’m not a XSL (EXtensible Stylesheet Language) or XML specialist but luckily I went yesterday evening to a session (TechNight) about tooling from my company. And one of the tools demo-ed was XML Spy which I tried to use with the XSL template downloaded from Keyvan Nayyeri blog about creating a Blogroll from OPML Files. But this template did not completely worked for Outlook exported RSS feeds :-(

So after this demo I just asked who knew more about XML and XLS and with the help of Wouter van der Harg I’ve now XSLT (XSL Transformations) which transforms the Outlook OPML file to a Blogroll HTML file. Kudos’ to Wouter!

So here are the steps for creating a Blogroll from your Outlook RSS feeds.

  1. Use the Outlook Import and Export Wizard to Export your RSS Feeds to an OPML file.
  2. Rename the *.opml file to *.xml
  3. Open in XML Spy (or an other XML editor) the Exported RSS Feeds XML.
  4. Assign the XSL Template to the Exported RSS Feeds XML file.
  5. Click on XSL Transformation and your Blogroll is created.

 

XSL Template

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" version="1.0">
	<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" omit-xml-declaration="no" indent="yes"/>
	<xsl:template match="/opml">
		<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[
		<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
		]]></xsl:text>
		<html xml:lang="en">
			<head>
				<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
				<title>
					<xsl:value-of select="head/title/text()" />
				</title>
				<style type="text/css">
					a:link, a:active, a:visited, a:hover
					{
						color: #ce0000;
						text-decoration: none;
					}
				</style>
			</head>
			<body>
				<h1>
					<xsl:value-of select="head/title/text()" />
				</h1>
				<ul>
					<xsl:apply-templates select="body/outline">
					<xsl:sort select="@text" data-type="text" order="ascending" case-order="upper-first"/>
					</xsl:apply-templates>
				</ul>
			</body>
		</html>
	</xsl:template>
	<xsl:template match="outline">
		<li>
			<xsl:attribute name="class">
				<xsl:value-of select="@type" />
			</xsl:attribute>
			<a>
				<xsl:attribute name="href">
					<xsl:value-of select="@htmlUrl" />
					<xsl:if test="not(@htmlUrl)">
						<xsl:value-of select="@xmlUrl" />
					</xsl:if>
				</xsl:attribute>
				<xsl:value-of select="@text" />
			</a>
		</li>
	</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Regards,
Stefan Stranger
http://weblog.stranger.nl

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 9:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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