For the Love of My Country

[Update: 13 March 09] So much for the Google Reader blog roll! I don't know what went wrong, but all the links disappeared out of the list. I played round with the settings at the Google Reader end, but to no avail. Instead I've just gone for a list that I will update manually. I think they will be higher-quality (more search engine friendly) links this way anyway.

If you're running Wordpress or Blogger mk2, this isn't an issue for you, because you've already got a built-in blogroll system that is darn good...

As many of you will know, Blogrolling.com was hacked - and was subsequently down for a long time. Half a year or something. Anyway, they're finally back up and running, so this evening I went through, revising and updating my blog roll - have been waiting to get onto this for ages. What they've done though, is they've made it so that if you don't pay for the service, when someone clicks on a blog in your list, it takes them to a blogrolling.com page with an advert at the top, and the blog you're visiting sitting in an iframe below. It's relatively inconspicous but still highly annoying. As a free service I loved it - but with the adverts and the new slow but flashy back-end interface, it's not worth bothering with.

Instead I've gone for a Google Reader blog roll which is incredibly simple. Just choose the blogs in Google Reader that you want to be in your blog roll, and add them to their own folder. Set the folder to "public", and then click the option that appears, "add a blog roll to your site". It's incredibly simple, and of course will update whenever you update your new "blogroll" folder from the Google Reader end.

Ok, it's got that Google look, but there's no ads and it's straight-forward and integrated with your blog reader, so what are you complaining about?

Apparently you can do this with Bloglines as well - if you're a bloglines user.

Labels: blog