Monday, May 5, 2008
Maintaining your blogroll
I have always been really awful about maintaining my blogroll, in part because I've had mixed feelings about them. I'd go to a site I liked, and there'd be this daunting list of of names, most of which give only minimal clues about what the site is like. But I never wanted to go to the trouble of trying to keep a blogroll that's (1) current, (2) gives some idea of what the destination site is like, and (3) doesn't take up more space than the actual content of my page does.Google to the rescue.
If you visit my blog's main page, you will (as of this writing, anyway) see a sidebar, which has the most recent few entries from people on my blogroll. This is nifty, because it is tied to Google Reader, which is my active feedreader.
Here's a little tutorial on how to do it. First, I'm assuming you've got a Google Reader account already; if you don't, you'll have to decide if it's worth switching to GReader to get this feature. Second, I'm assuming you don't want to dump your entire blogroll; if so, skip down a bit.
You'll want to set up a folder (a/k/a tag) of the blogs you want to have appear here. When you subscribe to a blog, make sure you set its subscription information to appear in the folder you've picked for your blogroll ("Change folders").
Or, if you're setting up a new folder from existing subscriptions, you can do do a bulk folder-setting. Either way, go to "Manage subscriptions."
The "Subscriptions" tab will let you check all the subscriptions you want to put in the new folder, if you're changing existing subscriptions. Once you've got a folder to publish (one way or the other), you want to switch to the "Tags" tab. Yes, Tags and Folders are kinda sorta the same thing. Also, if you're switching from Bloglines or some other service/program that supports OPML, that Import/Export tab is going to help you out.
Find the tag (folder) you want to publish. If you haven't already made it public, this line will not have all the extra links on the right.
Check the tag, and make it public.
After that, the magic links should appear. You want "add a clip to your site," and this will pop up a window to customize how it all appears. Adding a more traditional blogroll is pretty much the same, so I won't cover that explicitly.
In this case, I removed the title (because it's going to be under a standard sidebar heading on my site), increased the item count, and most importantly checked "Show item sources" so people can see blog names. I'm leaving it green in this case, but there are a number of schemes available, plus "none" which will let you set the appearance using your own site's CSS.
If you use Blogger predefined layouts, you can just use the nifty button to add it. I use templates, even on my Blogspot-hosted blog, so I copy and paste the HTML snippet (which has been magically updated as I've changed my preferences) into my template. Do whatever your blogging software requires to put that snippet on your page.
The advantages to the "clips" type: if and when blogfade happens, I don't have to agonize over when to finally remove the dead link from my sidebar (and the answer is always "a week before the blogger reappears), it gives visitors to my blog a little more information about what your blog is like, and once it's set up, it just automatically happens, based on my reading habits.
The disadvantages: it doesn't work for visitors who don't use JavaScript, and if a blog or its feed gets hijacked (it's rare, but spammers really want to do it, the more so if a feed is syndicated automatically) the spam gets piped automatically to my page too (though since it's also my regular feed reader, I'll see the spam and can remove that blog from the published folder right away).
It's got so many uses, though: for instance, I have a second "blogroll" of my own blogs, waaaay down at the bottom of the page, so if I haven't posted to this one recently, you can check that and see "Ah ha, she's blabbing away in the houseblog" or whatever I happen to be obsessed with at the time, even if you don't subscribe to my other blogs. And yes, my wide variety of disparate blogs is why I don't dump my entire blogroll in the other box: it's Perl blogs and sewing blogs and house blogs and roleplaying blogs and AJAX blogs and Flickr pools and comic feeds and Wichita blogs and friends' blogs and... somehow, I don't expect any of my readers to share every one of my interests. My full blogroll is a unique snowflake, I expect: a particularly large, baroque one.
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posted by Karen in Wichita
@ 11:24 AM
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