A Blogroll That Works

Sean McGrath: I’ve cleaned out the blogroll on my blog home page pretty dramatically. I’m now just using it for pointing to various ways of contacting me rather than linking to blogs that I read/recommend.  The main reason is that the blogroll isn’t a true reflection of the blogs I read these days. That would be by bloglines OPML file, not my blogroll.

Why not simply point to your BlogLines subscriptions?  That’s how I do it on my weblog.  It is even functional - people can click on feeds and then click on subscribe if they like what they see.  And if they scroll down, there is even a link for exporting the subscriptions.

“Small Pieces, Loosely Joined”


Why not? Because it adds extra steps?

If someone tech-savvy wants to read your blogroll, they need to click on BlogRoll and orient themselves with the bloglines interface.

If someone tech-n00b wants to read your blogroll, they’ll click on BlogRoll and then freak out.

It’s easier if you just export your subscriptions periodically and use one of the simple OPML-to-HTML converters.

That way, your blogroll is:

Here’s an example of how I execute that: [link]

Posted by Joe Grossberg at

Why not?  Because I’m a statistical outlier and have a gawdawful number of feeds in my subscription list.

Though, I have tried to share my reading lists through my new .plan page.

Posted by l.m. orchard at

Ooh ... that “.plan” is nice. I feel really unimpressive right now. :)

Posted by Joe Grossberg at

Sam Ruby: A Blogroll That Works

[link]...

Excerpt from del.icio.us/josephgrossberg at


Sam, I’m puzzled.  The Bloglines trick you’re using is OK, but...  Why not do something like this (taken from my own blog, and nothing more than cut-and-paste from Bloglines)

  <div id="blogroll">
  <h3>BlogRoll</h3>
  <script language="javascript"
  type="text/javascript"
  src="http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?id=MasterMark&target=_blank"></script>

  </div>

Posted by Mark Masterson at

Joe,

Your how-to page contains some dead links.  I’d love to see that PHP code.

Posted by Scott Johnson at

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