Almost a year ago I wrote about WordPress’ Link Manager. It’s an old feature of WP that seems to get very little use these days. But it is a way to collect links to websites and, this is the important part, their corresponding RSS/Atom feeds, and get an OPML file os the websites in question.

Collected links can be put in categories and every category has its own OPML. You can find the OPML for all my links here.

OPML is one of the file formats that can feed a river in River 5. As far as I know the OPML that River 5 reads needs to be in the lists folder in your River 5 installation, so at first glance that seems to rule out using WordPress’ OPML feature.

The not so secret sauce that makes it work is the ”include” node in OPML. In my lists folder I have and OPML file for each and every river I want River 5 to generate. Each of those files contain a single <outline> node that links to the corresponding category among my WP links.

For example, my ”Everything feed”:

This tells River 5 to include everything it finds at the URL http://blog.henrikcarlsson.se/wp-links-opml.php which, as I just mentioned, is the full list of links that I collect in my sites link manager.

So whenever I want to add or remove a link (site/blog/etc) I just use WordPress’ link manager. That makes it very simple to add and remove stuff and therefore I’m more likely to try to add new sites to the mix and see if they add to my satisfaction or not.