A Better Blogroll

The blogroll is a standard feature of most blogs that is conspicuously absent from the current version of this website. In the past I’ve struggled to keep my blogroll up-to-date. In order to be useful, I think the blogroll should contain only blogs that I am currently reading. That list fluctuates frequently, and I have a poor track record of keeping my blogroll in sync with my feed reader. One of the problems is that I regularly read many blogs, but there are very few blogs out there whose every post I enjoy.

But I use microblogging to share links. So, why not just continue with that method? When I created the latest version of this blog I decided to do away with the blogroll entirely. Now, when I read a blog post that I particularly enjoy, I blog about it. Like here or here. When I come across a blog that is full of wonderful posts, I blog about it too – and, chances are, I’ll still end up blogging about individual articles on those websites. All of these microposts are assigned the blogroll tag.

To me this seems like a much more meaningful way to share links. Rather than maintaining a separate page with a list of not-frequently updated links, you have the blogroll tag archive. Links are timestamped and curated, which makes it more useful to my readers. And I think that linking to specific content rather than full domains makes for a more useful and rewarding metric for the owners of the linked blogs.