I decided to add a blogroll to my sidebar, however a complete list would have been waaaay to long. Also, I didn’t like the idea of exporting the OPML from Google Reader and massaging it into an HTML format, because it would have meant an other thing which needed periodic updates.

The solution was to take my “shared items” feed from Google Reader, massage it a bit using Yahoo Pipes and create an other feed which includes the distinct blogs that had postings in the feed and include the resulting RSS feed in the sidebar. Unfortunately Blogger renders the feed gadget asynchronously via javascript, which means that I won’t give link goodies to the blogs, even though I would like to :-(.

If you wish to use the pipe yourself, it can be found here. All you need is to plug your RSS feed into it and you get back an RSS feed containing the (distinc) blogs and links to them. Given that I continuously update my shared list with things I read, the list too will get updated frequently.

Picture taken from oddsock’s photostream with permission.