Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

On Blogrolling.com

6th October 2007

I was ambling around the web and came across a website that, while it appeared to be a blog, isn’t one in the vein of that to which we are accustomed. It does, however, have a blogroll and that is where Blogrolling.com comes into this piece. Blogrolls are very much a feature of the blogging (WordPress call them that anyway) world and act as a repository of useful links relevant to the subject of the blog. I also use them as a bookmarking station for myself and a way to return the favour when someone links to my blog. For a blogroll, you generally need a database sitting behind in the background or you end up creating a list of links in (X)HTML.

Blogrolling.com offer another option: placing your links at an external website and including them on your webpages using a piece of code to pull in the information. RSS, JavaScript and PHP are among the methods on offer from Blogrolling.com; I used PHP when I gave the service a whirl on one of my offline blogs and that really does give you a lot of customising power over and above using CSS. That’s not to say that there aren’t customisation functions on offer from Blogrolling.com, I found a few of these distinctly useful: ordering of links in a blogroll is just one. When it comes to categorising your links, you don’t get the category option but you do get to create as many blogrolls as you want so there is a workaround; moving links from one blogroll to another is mouse intensive but straightforward. Also, because you are reading each blogroll in turn, you have the ability to order the categories as you want them. With WordPress’ category approach, ordering categories involves widgets and plugins or getting your mits dirty with some code cutting. All in all, Blogrolling.com seems to offer an intriguing and useful service.

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