Spurl.net

Just last night I finally joined the ranks of the Spurlers. (Yes, Morgaine, I’m way behind you on this, I know!) I haven’t yet “published” my collected links because I’m still working on them. The links I’m currently working on have to do with Celtic studies, and would not apply to this blog, but to my other domain, where I will want to display them in some form. I’m experimenting with link management in order to figure out better ways of serving up and maintaining a current list of links. Right now, I see two small weaknesses in spurl: it doesn’t support importing an OPML file, and it doesn’t support importing an XML file (which would be nice for grabbing your links, their titles, their descriptions, and their categories out of a content management system’s database in xml format). MySql databases (and this may be true of other dbs, I dunno) are capable of giving you an xml dump of whatever tables you select.

On the other hand, maybe there are other tools out there that I don’t yet know about which could possibly do what I’m thinking about doing. One nice thing about Spurl, though, is that it has a bot to check for broken links, making link maintenance a little bit easier in the long run. This becomes very important when your topic-specific links are in the thousands… and no, I’m not talking about creating link farms or anything of the sort. In dedanaan.com alone, I have over 600 links to Celtic Studies-related links. In my bookmarks, I have over 2000 links to all sorts of different topics (several of which I noticed are duplicates, telling me I need to better manage my bookmarks).