Post: More blogroll woes
The blogroll has temporarily disappeared from my site’s sidebar. This is due to some apparent up-cockery at blo.gs: the main page gives a singularly unhelpful “sorry, but the blo.gs service is temporarily unavailable. please try again later.” message. The actual blogrolling feature, however, kicks out some random feeds which I don’t know and wouldn’t necessarily want to have linked on my blog (screenie).
This is a clear violation of the Samurai Principle of “return victorious or not at all”: a corollary of this would be “when someone requests their blogroll, never return them an apparently random list of links”.
Does anyone have any suggestions for alternative services which could provide my blog with blogrolling functionality? Alternatively, I may just have to locate a handy Yahoo! employee and kick them until it gets fixed…
That’s some nice Blogrolling Mr Businessman.
I don’t know of anything that can reproduce the Blo.gs functionality exactly the same. You could get an alphabetical list out of Bloglines and XSLT it into a list, but it doesn’t output ‘last update’ timestamps so you’d lose the update ordering.
To be honest, I’d take the opportunity to ask why you want a blogroll on every page of your site, and consider if just providing static links would be just as good. That’s why I no-longer have have a live-updated blogroll on my site, at least.
I’m happy just to link to Bloglines for the time being, and at some point I’ll import the listing with a script and present it within my own design. I don’t think providing a ‘Last Updated’ service to vistors is particularly useful to anyone but myself. For a time I used my sidebar Blogroll to keep up to date with people updating their blog, but that function is performed better by a dedicated RSS reader.
Of course if you’re just looking for an excuse to give Simon a kicking then the above advice is somewhat useless. I worry as to why you’d want to though.
Oh, and I love the way you blog more when you’re on hiatus…
Without the “last update” timestamps, I can easily just upload an OPML feed straight out of NewsFire and just use that in a static fashion without the need for all these silly websites. Your second thought had also occurred to me during the course of my sporadic redesign work: I’m seriously contemplating replacing it with a del.icio.us linkroll or something of that ilk.