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And the winner is... Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Thanks to those who entered yesterday's little contest: the winner is OPML enthusiast Raymond M. Kristiansen and the answer, of course, is that I'm publishing to my own domain using the OPML Editor, something more than one is asking for.

So the next question is: how do I do that before Dave Winer releases the OPML community server? Dave himself wrote to ask whether I'm framing my blogs.opml.org weblog. Not exactly, framing would not allow bookmarking and all links would still point to blogs.opml.org. I'm doing something better and the answer is inside this zip file.

What the three files you should extract and put at your own domain do the following: the htaccess file (rename it to .htaccess or anything that fits your environment) tells the server to serve file or directory it finds and to redirect any other request to index.php.

This means that index.php called on requests for the site root and all the year/month/day URLs. The file parses the request and uses the rigthmost part to download the corresponding file at your blogs.opml.org site, changes all the URL references and links to match your own domain and outputs the file. The result is a page that's apparently identical to the original one but with links (calendar, permalinks and what have you) pointing to the new domain. All resulting URLs follow the usual pattern, that means that once you'll switch to your own community server all the old permalinks will work.

The third file is rss.php and it does more or less the same as index.php to mirror the feed, also changing the GUIDs to give your RSS readers permalinks to your own domain. This is the new URL of your feed you should redirect the old URL or point your feedburner feed to.

For all this to work you need a server supporting apache overrides via .htaccess files, PHP with curl support (you can change that to a file() call in case) and, obviously, to change all the references to your blogs.opml.org subdomain and your real domain in the index.php and rss.php files. This works great at DreamHost.

The beauty of it is that you don't have to change anything in the way you use the OPML Editor, you keep on publishing to the blogs.opml.org weblog and the mirroring is done dynamically, at every request to your own domain.

Feel free to contact me if this is not working for you.