I know I have a few fellow bloggers who stop by here, and I have a question about blogroll links. Obviously dead links can be removed, but what about blogs that aren’t updated? How long does it need to sit idle before the link is deleted? Is it months? A year? More?
From time to time I check my links and delete any that are dead. Today I also deleted links to blogs that are now open only to folks invited to read them. The whole point of links is to share with others, but if it’s behind an “invitation wall”, the link’s kind of pointless.
So that checking got me wondering if there’s any sort of consensus on protocol for linking to idle blogs who still link back. I’m not planning on scything through my blogrolls, but I am curious what other bloggers do.
5 comments:
Arthur - Back when I was using my Blogger blog, I started putting my blogs to post in chronological order, by most recent; there's a way to do that not intially available when I started my blog.
This had the dual goal of reminding me to go visit someone's blog, while not having to go there if they haven't posted for a week AND see if they've REALLY stopped posting for good when they say they have. (Nik, another NZ expat from the US, announced he was bagging the blog, but then came back, e.g.) I still use my old blog to visit you and other folks, because, if WordPress has this feature, I haven't discovered it.) Go back to www.rogerowengreen.blogspot.com and see how Eclectic Folks, e.g., displays on the sidebar.
How long you keep someone on depends on personal preference. When I DID delete people, and it happened a few times when I was still on my Blogger blog, it was after one year.
A while back I gave up the blogroll and started using the blogger widget that shows your blogs by when they update, which I found quite handy, I just put 20-30 of my favorite blogs in there and it only shows them when they update. I follow many other blogs on my google reader but just couldn't fit them all in my blogroll of old and it took up too much space!
I've never had a blogroll per se; I find massive lists of descriptionless links to be useless clutter.
Not to suggest I don't share some link love when I can. If another blogger has a particularly insightful post, I'll mention it in one of my posts, or on Twitter.
I also include a very small list of blogs that I personally read on a regular basis on a separate "resources" page (along with other more conventional resources related to my site's topic). I prune it out now and then, and the criteria is very easy. If I stop reading it, it's gone. :)
Instead of a blogroll, I now have a Blog of the Day. I also share links of individual posts from my reader.
Thank you so much for your feedback, everyone! You've actually inspired me to try a revamp of the whole link thing.
Roger and Nik, on my Podcast site I used to use a service that was similar, but kept failing, so I went back to my old system (which I use on this blog, too). I wrote the HTML myself in part so I could add the "target blank" code to make clicking a link open in a new window.
Mark, you make a good point: I was planning a resources page, anyway, so I may include something like what you have, maybe something a bit bigger than I was thinking originally (I like the idea of having descriptions).
Juli: I like the idea of a "Blog of the Day," though in my case "Blog of the Week" probably makes more sense.
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