What's in a Blogroll
Monday, June 7, 2004 at 9:42 pm | 
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Those of you who have blogs, how do you decide which sites will get added to your blogroll? (You do have a blogroll, don't you?) Personally, I see a blogroll as a way to link to other blogs that not only interest me, but are also written by people whom I respect. All the sites in my blogroll (er, at least the sites that are actually blogs ;) are the sites of people whom I respect, for one reason or another. Many of these people were very influential in my conversion from legacy markup to standards-compliance and CSS-based design. Others have writing that is just too good to pass up. Think Dunstan and Ethan - their posts make me smile. Or laugh.
I'm not likely to add someone's site just because they write and ask me to, even if they offer a reciprocal link. I'm guessing that most other bloggers feel the same way and only add sites to their blogroll on their own terms. What criteria do you have for linking to other blogs?
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I don't have a blog (yet), but I'd recommend adding DxF to your blogroll... You usually have a link to something he's written in your blogmarks anyways, and the site is pretty great.
I've only recently added a blogroll to my website. There are several factors that influence whether or not a site gets added to mine, including (but not limited to):
Frequent updates
Availability via blo.gs
Large cash backhanders
Principally though, I add those sites where the content is similar to my own. I assume that if my visitors enjoy my content, then they might also enjoy that of my favourite sites (a bit like Amazon's "those who bought ... also liked ...").
Oh yeah, there's one other factor too - my blogroll is my own quick-link to my favourites.
As DarkBlue said, availability through blo.gs is also a "requirement" for my own blogroll, as the blogroll receives it's updates through that service. Until recently, DxF wasn't available via blo.gs, thus it was not in my blogroll. Apparently it now pings blo.gs, and apparently it just got added to my blogroll. ;)
Good point about the similarity of the content of the sites. I meant to mention that in my post, but guess I didn't. A very good point.
Hi Ryan
I decided not to add a regular blog-roll to my blog as I guess that many readers will already have many of the links already in their bookmarks or reader.
But I did decide to have external links to some other designers whom I either know, admire or who say nice things about my blog.
To add a bit of geographical balance, I split off British designers into my Brit Pack.
I'm relatively new to blogging but my primary reason for starting a blog in the first place was to keep track of my bookmarks (I work on 2 or 3 pc's strewn all over the place).
After a few weeks I noticed there were a few blogs that I read every day, others less so (some are only updated infrequently), so I split my 'blogroll' into 'regular reads' and 'irregular reads'.
Now I'm using www.bloglines.com as my agregator, I'm relying less and less on my home grown blog roll.
Criteria wise, frequently updated with good quality content goes into the 'Regular Reads' any other blog goes into 'Irregular Reads'.
Individual blog articles of note usually get a link in a more relevant catagory.
When I started blogging two years ago I made the mistake of doing reciprocal linking, just because I had this insane need to be nice. "Gee," I thought, "this person was nice enough to link to me, I should do the same." Except, well, that gets old quick. Not to mention messy.
So, I took the blogroll(s) of the main page and cleaned them up. The first tier are people I know in real life and my (semi) daily reads. I give a lot of thought to who goes on that list because it's awfully hard to take them off.
The other lists are fluid, I put blogs on and off depending on what I'm interested in at the moment. If I come across a site that looks interesting, but that I don't really have time to explore, I just add it to a list and come back to it later. For people who are mindful of who's linking to them, that probably is annoying, but my lists are purely for my ease and enjoyment so I don't give that much thought.
I don't have a weblog but there are selective few, which I link to from my websites and they go under the criteria of how much I respect the person behind the words and not the words themselves.
It's the actions and motivations of the individual that gain my respect and only a few people have managed that so far...
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June 7th, 2004
10:11 PM | #
Well I've got a random blog on a page with seemingly no design, I'm just working on the code at the moment (ASP forever yeah!).
There's not even a hint of a blogroll but maybe when I finish off my master piece I will start a serious (but not too serious) site, with a blogroll.
I would give a link to this random blog but I wouldn't want to polute your nice clean site with such filth. ;)
It's in my sig at the webdev forums though.