Top Secret: Easier Blogrolls

If you are a serious web publisher, you probably have multiple websites.  Not certainly, but probably, I’d say.  In my own case, I have dozens of websites.  I also have certain pages within websites that I try to highlight by linking to them.  For example, if you have a blog about caring for cats you want to link to that.  If you have a single page on that blog that sells your e-book about how to save a fortune on cat food, you probably want a separate link in your blogroll that links to that one page too.

Problem is, it seems like a big job to set up a blogroll to your various sites if you have a lot of them.  For me, if I really set up a full blogroll to all of my sites and individual pages that way it should be done, I have about 60 different links in my blogroll (not even counting if I want to link to other people’s sites).  But, sitting there and typing in 60 or more links into your blogroll is a big job.  It takes time to do something like that.

My software of choice for nearly all of my sites is WordPress.  Even for sites that are not really blogs, I find that WordPress does a great job for me.  In fact, I use WordPress on all of my websites, except for e-commerce sites, where there are shopping cart programs that are more robust than any shopping application you can do on WordPress currently.  What? You didn’t know you could do a shopping cart on WordPress?  Well, you can, but it’s not quite as robust as what I would like to see yet.  Someday it will be, though, I believe.

OK, getting back to blogrolls.  A few months back, I did a major revamp on one of my websites.  I’m not talking about changing the way it looks – oh, I did that, but I changed the complete functionality of the site too.  As part of the process, I set up various Blogroll Categories, with multiple links in each Category.  In all, I had nearly 70 links in 4 different categories.  A few weeks later, I was setting up a new website, and I wanted to have all those same links, in the exact same format for the new site.  What a job to type all of that in, though!

Why doesn’t WordPress have the ability to import/export Blogrolls?

Well, I was surprised to learn that they do!  Yes, they seemingly try to hide it, but you can actually export the blogroll from one of your blogs, and import it into another blog!  So, what would take hours to do can be done in minutes instead!

How?

Well, it is not hard to do, once you know how.  Problem is that WordPress does not really tell you how to do it!  So, I will.

Here is how to export your blogroll from a WordPress blog where you have all your links as you want them:

1. Go to your blog that you wish to export from, but use a slightly different URL:  http://PathToYourBlogHere.com/wp-links-opml.php
2. When you go to that URL structure, you will get an XML file of your blogroll.  Just save that as an XML file.
3. Once you have completed steps one and two, you are finished with the exporting part of the job.

Next, you will need to import those links to the new blog where you want to have the links:

1. Go to your WordPress admin area, and go to the Tools menu.
2. Click Import.
3. You will be given a list of things you can import, choose “Blogroll” which should be second on the list.
4. Select the file on your hard drive, and click “Import OPML File” and once it finishes importing you are finished!

Another, even easier way to do this is to follow steps 1 and 2 from the Import task above, and then just enter the URL of your blog that you want to get links from.  Don’t forget to add the “wp-links-opml.php” at the end, though.  Once you do this, click on “Import OPML File” and you are done!

So, save yourself from all of the hard work!  Use the import function to move your links from one blog to another!  Why does WordPress not promote this more to make the job easier for thousands?