As my second act of #Blaugust, I am in the process of re-viewing and rejuvenating the blogroll. While I’ve never had the world’s shortest blogroll, I have always kept a well-tended list of handpicked blogs on my sidebar since my blogroll is also really my personal reader.
Love your blogroll!
As part of the NBI in 2013, I wrote a longer post on how I handle my blogroll and why I think it’s an important feature for anyone looking to engage with blogging communities. As an MMO blogger, you’re part of a niche inside the greater gaming world and most of us don’t thrive in a vacuum. Besides giving you a chance to promote other blogs or identify with a subset of bloggers, a blogroll is about exchange. With that in mind, I seek out blogs that align with my thematic interests but are also run by writers that approach their blogging in ways I can respect or admire. If you’re by any chance still somewhat new to blogging and setting up your page, my advice is still the same: run a blogroll. Decide what you want from it, be patient when it comes to other bloggers adding you to theirs and don’t take it too seriously/personally, either.
According to the latest blaugust update no less than 77 blogs have signed up, so I am still in the process of browsing and getting to know “new” bloggers. For some early blaugust linklove, I like to highlight the following recent additions to my blogroll:
- Gamers Decrypted
- Battle Priestess
- The Iron Dagger
- Knifesedge Blogs
- Gamer Girl Confessions
- Star-fired Beef
If you’re currently reviewing your blogroll thanks to blaugust, share the love on your blog and let others know when you add them!
I actually just added Belghast to mine. I have no rational explanation as to why he wasn’t on there already, other than he doesn’t appear to comment on other people’s posts, or not on any of the blogs I read. The huge majority of blogs I read I discovered via comments their owners made on other blogs rather than by going to the blogs directly. That and the NBI of course. I’ve always had the policy of adding the blog of anyone who comments on one of my posts to my blog roll although sometimes I forget.
I must cull the dead wood soon though. In theory, because Blogger has that wonderful feature where it sorts the list by most recent activity, I could just leave inactive blogs to lurk at the bottom of the list but in practice it makes for a ridiculously long “tail” that I find annoying when I try to scroll down for other part of the blog.
It’s funny you mention that bhagpuss since most of the new and interesting blogs i’ve come across are directly due to your blogroll!
@Bhag
Yeah there’s always people who fly under your radar somehow, even in a blogosphere as small as ours. There are bloggers I haven’t added for the same reason, because they never seem to interact anywhere or don’t run a blogroll themselves. There needs to be a certain degree of participation for me.
And the long tail is something I cull as well. There’s just a very few people I can’t bring myself to cull, like Spinks. 🙂 I keep hoping they’ll come back, hehe.
Someone make free WordPress offer a better blogroll widget… (Commercial WordPress is right out as I don’t want to deal with unnecessary administrative/hosting stuff.)
After months of struggling to maintain something that only had one click-through every week (normally on the first blog that started with A) and envying those on Blogspot, I just threw up my hands and deleted it.
I make up for it by linking thought-provoking posts I’ve read or leaving a ton of comments on other peoples’ blogs instead to let them know they’re not talking into the void. 😛
That’s fair enough in my book. 😉
Am not super-familiar with free wordpress, am just glad I was able to create a blogger style blogroll (which is really the best) with self-hosted WP after installing a few plugins.
Yeah, my Feedly is exploding with new additions. I am curious to see what happens a few months from now when I have to tame it again.
I don’t think that would work for me; adding all blaugust bloggers to my blogroll and then cut down again hehe…..need a reader for that for sure. I also don’t want to end up promoting blogs that turn out to be….not so great later down the line. I made that mistake once or twice in the past and it just bugs me on a very personal level.
Thank you for the mention, Syl!