Building a linklog with Bloglines

There's a new part on the site, a list of links or linklog that contains links to interesting items from the webfeeds I read. The list is not maintained on this site, but comes from Bloglines, which I use as my reader for webfeeds. Here's how I did that:

The links are stored using the blog on Bloglines that comes with an account. I activated my blog and created Kwebble's linklog. On Bloglines you can post to the blog direct from the reading page by using the Clip/Blog This link. This makes collecting items from several webfeeds very easy.

The next step is to get the data here on Kwebble.com. The input from Bloglines that can be used for this is the webfeed for the blog. With the freely available MagpieRSS using this webfeed is easy. MagpieRSS can retrieve the webfeed, cache it and parse it's contents. These few lines of PHP add the items to this page:

require_once('rss_fetch.inc');
$rss = fetch_rss('http://www.bloglines.com/blog/kwebble/rss');
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
    preg_match('/.*?><a href="(.*?)".*?>(.*?)<.*?/', $item[description], $matches);
    echo '<li><a href="' . $matches[1] . '">' . $matches[2] . '</a></li>';
}
echo '</ul>';

The regular expression gets the first link from each message. I could have used $item[description] directly but Bloglines adds some attributes to the link I don't want.