Posted by: David Spinks - 29 December 2009 / 11:57
Photo cred: Nicole Simon
We’ve been thinking about how we’d like to design this blog and how we can keep it simple and effective. That means keeping the sidebar nice and neat with limited clutter.
One of the first things I thought about was the blogroll, and whether or not it’s necessary. When sharing links to other blogs on your blog, there are 3 common options:
- Manually create a blogroll with the links to blogs that you read.
- Install a blogroll widget.
- Create a seperate page on your blog for links (this way, you’re not linking out from every page on your blog)
Adding the links manually seems to be of fading efficiency. Today, a lot of people hop around from blog to blog, and tend to change their tastes quite often. The static list of links hardly ever gets clicked, as the blogroll doesn’t tell you much about the site, just names and links.
Where people once relied on blogrolls to find new blogs, networks like twitter have quickly become the go to resource for blog discovery for many readers.
If you want something more dynamic for your blogroll, that will change with your tastes, you can add a widget…but your options are limited. All the widgets I’ve seen are based on random links, or on your RSS reader, which by the way, is dying… is the blogroll dying along with it?
Do you still use the blogroll? Is it effective? Do we just need more options?
Tags: Blogroll, dying, reader, Widget
