The FeedReader vs. the Sexy Blogroll

or in my case, the not-so-sexy blogroll.

A few months back, sometime this summer, I started using a feedreader for all my daily (or daily attempts) at by favorite blog reads. I tried out Bloglines. I tried out Google Reader. I even tried Thunderbird, my e-mail client. My final preference was for Google Reader. I like it’s looks, it’s simplicity, and I even fell for the other Google offerings that the other two clients do not offer.

My thoughts waxed and waned on keeping a blogroll. I had gotten fed up with my blogroll and the various services such as pingomatic and blogrolling.com. I did not always get updates from pingomatic when using my Wordpress blogroll links. Blogrolling.com would often be down and cause ugly code to bounce around in my sidebar where I had the code installed. These two things drove me crazy as I usually only check on the blogs that showed they were updated. You know, why go over to that blog if it has not been updated. Then I sat down one day and decided to check out each and every blog that seemed inactive and realized that they were too being updated. UGH! the frustration. Do not even get me started on the services that do not update (like Xanga). OH, my Xanganite friends I want to move you all – I’d even do it myself if I had the time.

So I pitched the whole blogroll thing all together and just stuck with using my favorite reader. But I noticed a few things:

1. Because not all my blogging buddies had proper feeds I was only reading the blogs that fed me. Which means I lost touch with some great bloggers and I fell off the face of the blogging world to some of them as well. Which of course leads me to . . .
2. I quit commenting on many blogs and they too quit commenting over here. I love the simplicity and streamlining of the feedreader (everything in one place), but I lost the personal contact. I was losing the personal touches of each blogs personality – the color, the design, the “feel” of each one. It is
like talking on the phone with a friend instead of meeting for lunch. I can hear your voice, but I can see your new hair cut or outfit or those lovely new shoes your sportin’. Or how about the fact that every time I pick up the phone there is going to be some interruption (uhm, six children), but if we go out for lunch you have my undivided attention.
3. I like links to me. You like links to you. We all like links. Seriously, what blogger doesn’t? Links to our blogs can do lots of things for us but most importantly links bring us traffic. And traffic is good, even if you are not bloggin gto make money with ads, traffic is good. As the Rev. said when he started blogging (so appropriately for this time of year anyway), “Blogging is just emotional Trick-or-Treating”. HA! Not exactly, but yeah, kind of: comment me, link me, affirm me, please.
4. I even threw out the baby out with the bathwater, yes, i did. I’ll be putting back up a Blogroll page, watch for there in my NavBar? I didn’t want to de-link anyone just because I was not going to technically use my blogroll anymore; so I chose to create a page and put the blogroll links there. I actually have had the page created all along, just not in my header. I must admit that I do not even know it doing it that way affected linkership (I made that up. Where’s Webster?) or not, but I wanted to try.
5. Lately, I had a few new incoming links appear in my dashboard and I clicked over to check them out and I have to admit that it was fun seeing my little blog title added to a some new blogrolls. I had forgotten how fun that could be (yes, I know it doesn’t take much to thrill me-sometimes).

Miss Kerflop is making an oh-so-sexy-blogroll. She’s putting in a very sexy blogroll (of sorts). It is not traditional in the way a blogroll typically works (it seems). She is putting in a rotating blogroll with pretty (everything she does is pretty) little graphics that rotate. I have my suspicions that she is going to use a snippet of each blogger’s banner. I base this on the screenshot she has up on her current post about it. I don’t think her blogroll is meant to update and notify of new posts, just giving back some linky love to her readers and commenters. She has a lot of comments on that post about others wanting to do it too and is she using a plugin and could it be made into a plugin and so on and so forth.

That got me thinking about a lot of different stuff. Some of which I will not touch with a ten foot pole. But here are some other thoughts, some of which are old and have resurfaced. I use a rotator.php plugin for rotating images and I wrote a function set for rotating random text; I wonder if these or another similar plugin could be used for that kind of a purpose? I don’t see why not as I use it for rotating text and graphics. I haven’t tried rotating individual links with it, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. Also, personally, I don’t know that I would use it unless some script were added to show updates to those rotating through. Or, if I decide to bring back my blogroll how I would incorporate it on my blog. I want a to give linkage back to those who link to me, but I do have some reads that don’t link to me. I like to keep them separate (for me and my organization). I want to have a list that would include my readers and reciprocal linkers and then one for my daily reads (whether they link to me or not). Also, there are some bloggers who are registered members on my site and allowed to read content that doesn’t always appear to the public, so I would sort of like to “honor” them in some special way. Of course, maybe I am just making it all too much and should just combine everything together for the sake of simplicity.

Secret-Agent-Josephine has a monthly drawing for her Banner-of-the-month-winner. (I am featured this month. :) )

I’ve been cleaning out the links that were in my blogroll, checking up on who has “quit” blogging and who has added me here and there. I’ve been debating on how to do this and if it matters or not how I do it. Maybe I’ll put up a standard blogroll with everyone on it, my reads and my linkers, and just feature a weekly blogger. Maybe the weekly blogger will have to be the one with the most comments here and have a blog that is being updated fairly frequently (at least a few times a week). Graphic, no graphic? Dunno. I may just throw it all out again.

Now, about linkage. Who does not like linkage? Are you familiar with the You comment, I follow movement? Well, I do not know that I can explain it very well, but I’ll try. Most blogging platforms automatically put in a nofollow tag in the commenter’s URL link so that it gets stripped from giving link credit for boosting rank. This is really just a way of fighting spam, but it affects everyone. So the You comment, I follow movement is out to fix the negative aspects of this. With various plugins you can change this on your blog. These plugins strip the “nofollow” rule and allow the links to follow boosting your ranks. I was going to list them, but Andy Beard has the Ultimate list of these plugins. Here are what other bloggers are saying about the dofollow movement – and they say it better than I do:
Randa Clay
Life in the Country
A Byootiful Life
Tricia’s Musings

All this talk and what does it mean? It means that I will be doing something new/different/same with my blogroll and just don’t know yet what I’m going to do. And that I am a member of the I follow movement. I use Lucia’s Linky Love plugin because it allows me the most options for configuration. Basically, I have it set so that regular commenters get the love. Once a commenter has commented so many times (I’m not telling how many) then the plugin gets activated and starts following. This is in order to cut down on human comment spam. I also use the CommentLuv plugin from Andy Bailey (I still think his title is the best: Fiddyp).

So how many of you did I lose in that post?

Tagged as: blogroll, feedreader, feeds, i follow, nofollow, Plugins