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Goodbye Blogrolling, Hello Del.icio.us (maybe)
When Tucows bought Blogrolling.com last year, everyone figured the days of free were over. I was pleasantly surprised when nothing on my account seemed to change. However, I just got a message from Blogrolling telling me I'll need to pay $20/year from now on to use the service at my current level (I have 10 blogrolls, although I only actually use about four). Um, no. The links in the sidebar (“ambivalent links”) are now coming courtesy of the del.icio.us bookmark manager. (Thanks to the RSSfeed plugin and these tips from MovableBlog.) What you see here is only a selection; it's supposed to be the links I try to visit daily, or as often as possible. Unfortunately, it appears that del.icio.us is truncating the feed. The list should contain about 4o links, but only 31 are showing up in the feed. If you understand these things and can tell me if there's a way to make del.icio.us send the whole list, please let me know. At any rate, the current list includes a few blawgs, a few blogs, a couple of news sources, and a few photoblogs. Ironically, many of the sites I visit most frequently are actually not on this list b/c I visit them directly (by typing in the URL) instead of relying on a link list to get me to my destination. As I discover more of these, I'll add them to the del.icio.us list. The new sidebar also contains separate sections for GW blawgs and Blawgcoop blawgs (obviously), all of which I try to visit on a regular basis, as well. If you miss some of the additional links that have long appeared in the “ambivalent links” sidebar on this page, you'll probably find what you're looking for on my del.icio.us page under the tags blawg or blog. If you'd like to narrow further in the law-related category, or if you'd just prefer to surf links that are all of one type (all blawgs by law students, for example), lawstudent, attorney, and professor are all subcategories of “blawg.” If you're not yet familiar w/del.icio.us, it's a bookmark service that allows you to save bookmarks and “tag” them with keywords so you can find them later and so all similar content can be grouped together. It's also a social networking tool because in addition to your own links, you can see all the links all other users have tagged with the same keywords, or you can see all the other users who have bookmarked a certain page. It's cool. It's free. And considered as a replacement for Blogrolling.com, it's even more useful b/c it makes it even easier to add, sort, and display URLs, which were all the reasons I liked Blogrolling in the first place. Of course, if del.icio.us won't send the full feed, it's not really going to do what I want, so I may have to look for a new blogroll solution. Any suggestions?Posted February 21, 2005 07:44 AM | meta-blogging
It is my understanding that one can use Bloglines to produce blogrolls. I haven't tried it, but it is another option that is out there.
Posted by: JR at February 21, 2005 09:53 AM
i use bloglines. it's not as flexible as it sounds like del.icuo.us is—no tagging capabilities—but you can create folders and then display those folders at will. I code my roll headings in my template but let bloglines populate the list of links (they give you a single tag that calls up the roll you want); however, I think if you just choose to display your entire bloglines list, it will show your folder names (again—I'm not sure about that).
at any rate, when i want a feed, i use my "subscribe" bookmarklet to add it to bloglines, and choose the folder to file it in at that time. i can also mark it "private" and it doesn't show up in my roll (useful for blogs i just want to check out; if i like it, i'll usually make it public rather quickly).
also, bloglines has the notifier that sits in my dock and tells me when i have new things to read. overprolific bloggers don't get monitored by the notifier, though—i read them when I have time. ditto for news.
Posted by: kristine at February 21, 2005 10:01 AM
