Honey, I stretched the blogroll
Decided to follow the example of quite a number of my peers and use blogrolling.com to handle my blogroll (I’ve been meaning to add a bunch of new blogs but the process of adding them manually is so tedious that I kept putting it off).
As soon as I signed up I realized I’d need access to the “contributor features” before I could make the auto-generated blogroll conform to my site design. So I made a donation via PayPal and, much to my surprise, instead of taking “up to three days to activate the donators features” they’d all been switched on by the time I returned to my preferences page. Perhaps Jason DeFillippo actually meant three minutes.
Since my main page—the one that displays my blogroll—is a PHP page, I was able to use Blogrolling’s PHP option:
If your blog supports PHP and allow_url_fopen you can call the data from Blogrolling directly bypassing JavaScript. This has the distinct advantages that it loads text into your page before display so it can be read by search engines and other robots that can’t read the JavaScript code. To use this you must know your way around PHP.
In my case, “knowing your way around PHP” meant being able to copy a block of PHP code into my main index template, wrap it in opening and closing <ul> tags, change the value of the variable $url to reflect my own blogroll, upload the template to the server, and rebuild the indexes. (To be honest, I got it working on a test page first then folded the code into a template module, but once I’d done that it only took a minute to modify the main index template.)
I spent less than an hour setting up the blogroll and now making additions to it is a snap—particularly since there’s a Bookmarklet that allows you to add links to your blogroll without going back to blogrolling.com. Plus, I’ve set a preference to have recently updated blogs appear at the top of the list: so much better than alphabetical order.
But wait, there’s more! You can set up your browser to open your blogroll in the sidebar. I’ve always avoided using the sidebar because I wasn’t interested in any of the default news/shopping/sports links. But I just discovered that the Mozilla sidebar has a Google search pane—no more entering search terms into the location bar and forgetting to press the down-arrow to activate a Google search.
Now that I have my blogroll automated, I’m hoping someone will establish weblogEntryWriting.com.
I was using Blogrolling.com for a while as well, but eventually switched back to my previous method for no apparent reason.
At first I used the order by most recent feature as well, but found it annoying that I couldn't seem to find the links that I wanted. Now that I am reading Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface", I know that it's because I am preventing automaticity. It becomes habitual to go to a certain place on your blogroll to click on a link for a particular site. If those links are moving all the time this habituation becomes impossible. This shouldn't affect you unless you, like I, use your website as a kind of "away from home" bookmark list.
Posted by: gord on 13 February 2003 at 02:21 AM