blogroll

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A blogroll is a list of other sites that you read, are a follower of, or recommend.

Why

Having a blog roll is a way of giving back to the blogs you enjoy. People who visit your site may be interested in reading similar content. By having a blog roll, visitors can easily find similar websites that they may want to read.

How to

How to create or update

A good way to start or update a blogroll is by making a list of sites whose content you often bookmark or respond to. You could go through your existing reader and choose the sites that you enjoy the most to start your blogroll.

A blogroll can be as simple as a list of links that point to a site's homepage, such as:

IndieWeb

Optionally, you could provide direct links to the feeds to which you subscribe rather than a site homepage. This is a good idea if you only subscribe to particular feeds on a site, such as a notes feed or a bookmarks feed.

You may also want to offer an OPML download for your blogroll on your site. Offering an OPML file to visitors means they can easily subscribe to all of the feeds to which you are subscribed. This might be desirable to someone new to subscribing to feeds and who may not have many or any existing feed subscriptions.

How to re-enable the long lost Links subsystem in WordPress

Install Eazy Enable Blogroll to re-enable the Links Manager (or add the line of code add_filter( 'pre_option_link_manager_enabled', '__return_true' ); to your functions.php file or somewhere in a plugin, or theme) and use the provided widgets.

IndieWeb Examples

IndieWeb community members with blogrolls:

Barnaby Walters

Barnaby Walters has a blogroll marked up with h-card and xfn since ????-??-??

http://waterpigs.co.uk/contacts
- As of 2016-05-31, this page is 404

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill displays a list of sites he's following at http://gregorlove.com/following/ since 2016-04-05

Uses only simple h-card markup, pending consumers that need something more.

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich has had the built in blogroll for WordPress since he started, but began actively using one on 6/25/17 with xfn and updated it relatively significantly on 2017-11-10. The OPML file for his larger firehose feed of followed sites can be found at http://boffosocko.com/wp-links-opml.php. Rather than the previous traditional sidebar blogroll on his front page (or all his pages), he has opted for a much larger following page to display all the people/sites he's following. In the modern web, people are following a much larger set of people and sites than in the early 2000's blogging era, this full Following page is meant to reflect that reality.

Ryan Barrett

Ryan Barrett keeps a list of feeds (including blogs) he reads: https://snarfed.org/feeds

Jamie Tanna

Jamie Tanna has a list of blogs he recommends at https://www.jvt.me/blogroll/

Ton Zijlstra

Ton Zijlstra publishes an OPML file that includes a stylesheet so it becomes human readable as blogroll. More details at [1]

Jan-Lukas Else

Jan-Lukas Else has a blogroll on his blog. It gets automatically updated from his subscriptions with Miniflux.

Michael Beckwith

tw2113 has a blogroll at https://achooandthesneezes.com/recommendations/ highlighting recommended authors and audiofiction podcasts

Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks's original blog at https://epeus.blogspot.com/ has a blogroll since ????.

capjamesg

capjamesg has a blogroll on his personal website. James' blogroll needs to be updated manually. It is structured as a blog post on his site with a custom /blogroll/ permalink.

James is considering whether he can create an automatically-generated blogroll on his website.

Peter Molnar

Peter Molnar has a links OPML, along with an XSL stylesheet to make it human readable in the browser. He used to exchange banners with others before the turn of the millenium, because that was the cool thing then and there, and only heard about blogrolls when WordPress came around with it's now hidden link manager subsystem.

Luis Quintanilla

lqdev.me has a blogroll for blogs and podroll for podcasts he's subscribed to. Both pages provide a link to OPML files for simpler import into RSS feed readers and podcast clients. Blogroll OPML Podroll OPML

Apis Necros

Apis Necros maintains a blogroll marked up with xfn. They link to their friends' sites, as well as other tech and cyber security authors they follow.

Joe Crawford

Joe Crawford maintains a blogroll on the main page of his blog and also on its own blogroll page. It includes OPML view and download capability. Like Peter Molnar, his site uses the "hidden for new installs" link manager that is built into WordPress.

Zachary Kai

Zachary Kai maintains a blogroll on his site. It's organized by category with a table of contents, and each item has a sentence about it and how he discovered it.

Past Examples

Tantek

Tantek Çelik used to manually maintain a blogroll on his older blog since 2002-11-01, which he would update each month, during the month, and then let its state at the end of the month be frozen for that month and the permalinks for that month.

Most recently: https://tantek.com/log/2008/08.html

Tom Morris

Tom Morris had a blogroll separate from his home page.

about Tom's blogroll page

Examples in the wild

More example

User:Melvincarvalho.com has a blogroll on his site with a list of co-workers / colleagues "people I know and had the pleasure to work with".
- http://melvincarvalho.com/
While possibly not updated regularly/maintained, Craig Mod has created a newsletter-blogroll (or newsletterroll?) at https://craigmod.com/essays/newsletters/#good-peoples

Brainstorming

I have two issues with traditional-style blogrolls: they required maintenance, and have no utility other than existing on your homepage for people to maybe click. --Waterpigs.co.uk 16:24, 1 July 2013 (PDT)

Remove maintenance by making blogrolls more tangible — for example derive them from your address book, a feed reader or people you mention. In the past blogrolls often meant “people who’s blogs I read”, and were organised by frequency. All of that information exists/could be derived from feed readers. Similarly, “people I mention” is a tangible, interesting metric which reflects real-world behaviour.

Blogrolls could also be made more actionable, for example if feed readers were to accept a URL with XFN and h-card on, and subscribe to all of the people, or a filtered subset (e.g. all XFN friends, or h-cards tagged with a particular p-category).

Colin Walker has both a traditional blogroll and what would be better described as a "mentionroll" located at https://colinwalker.blog/directory/. The latter is a list of people who have actively interacted with his site or content by means of Webmention. He has put the code (for WordPress) on Github.

Perhaps upcoming functionality made more easily available by Microsub will be helpful in extending the idea of a blogroll or who to follow functionality.

Brainstorming: how to start or expand a blog roll, perhaps through replies or homepage webmentions?

Articles and Related Links

2005-05-07 Dorothea Salo: Ah, yes, the blogroll (archived)

I ditched my blogroll quite some time ago, when I discovered that revising it was a social act with social consequences. One of the principals in the current blogroll debate had swamped my (often inadequate, conceded) ability to cope with moodiness, angry chaff, incessant conflict, and “if you’re not 100% with me you’re 100% against me—AND YOU SUCK!” all-or-nothing thinking.

2005-11-24 Morgan McLintic: Are blogrolls bound for the scrapheap? (archived)
2008-07-08 Duncan Riley: What Ever Happened To Blogrolls? (archived)
2008-07-09 James Joyner: Blogrolls, RIP (archived)
2019-01-02 Hidde de Vries: Return of the blog roll
2020-02-26 David Weinberger: My 2004 Blogroll
Y’see, back in the old days of the Blogosphere, there wasn’t any Facebook or Twitter. Your blog was your presence on the Web. And because people are relational, not independent autonomous agents, many bloggers posted a list of the other blogs they read and sometimes responded to. It was a way of building a networked community.

2021-04-05 The official Medium blog: Blogrolls: Making Writer Discovery Seamless
"So our blogrolls will automatically show writers you follow, _sorted by who has most recently published_. This approach makes blogrolls a living, breathing feature that reflects the activity in your network as it grows and changes."

2021-01-12 @nicklewis: Hi friends of Twitter I am adding people to my Blogroll, yes remember those? You may be on it already but if you fancy it, please respond with a URL and a way you'd like to describe yourself. Many thank yous. #indieweb #blogroll #bloggers

2022-05 Maya: blogrolls (archived)

Other examples

http://interconnected.org/home/blogroll
https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/01/28/unique-blogroll-periodic-table-of-blogs/ example with output as a periodic table

History

Doc Searls has been credited with coining the term blogroll in a blog post on 2000-12-17. The term itself is a pun based on the concept of logrolling, which references the trading of favours between neighbours or peers.

Why