Blogrolls (reprise)

Last week I posted The return of the blogroll (and more), and — typically! — almost immediately afterwards I found out that many people have already been discussing blogrolls over the past few weeks, months, and even years (many of these people’s blogs have now been added to my feed reader and my blogroll!).

The first one I found was Tracy Durnell’s Building community out of strangers which is well worth a read and is bristling with outbound rabbit holes to explore, ending with a declaration that:

…we can restore — and even reinvent — the blogroll, recognizing the value it provides in helping build a connected internet and world of blogs: the function they can serve in connecting people.

Tracy’s post is primarily concerned with how and why blogs build community, and indeed why people blog in the first place.

Roy Tang made the point in his post Thoughts on Blogging, 2020 Edition that he writes for himself first and foremost, but why in public? He goes on to say:

I write in public because we as humans have so much in common, even if we aren't aware of it. And while writing down one's own thoughts or opinions or everyday happenings may seem like it would be entirely uninteresting to the average reader, there will always be some aspect of your stories that will resonate with someone else, somewhere, because of that shared human experience.

I’ve been thinking about my own motivations for blogging - since this blog has been running since 2008, so I should have figured it out by now!

As an artist’s studio diary/notebook it’s very much written for myself, but it is published in public for other people. This may sound stupidly obvious — and indeed it is — but it’s a thought that had never actually occurred so clearly to me before.

I’d write it anyway — probably in a paper notebook — but if by publishing it publicly then it can be helpful or interesting for other people then that makes far more sense than leaving it on my bookshelf or in my desk drawer. If it can be part of a community of blogs then that makes it even more useful to both myself and others.

In late November fLaMEd posted about adding some useful context about why each link is on his blogroll in The Art of Hyperlinking, which sounds like another future step for my own blogroll.

After adding my own blogroll (which can be found at the bottom left of this blog’s front page) as a large chunk of static HTML last week, I have just changed it to be database-driven for easier maintenance.

I’ve also added XFN 1.1/XOXO 1.0 XMDP and h-card microformats2 markup to it, and also added the ability to download the entire blogroll as an OPML file for importing into your own RSS feed reader, should you wish.

The changelog for v1.4.0 of this site can, as usual, be found here.

The move to using the database to store the details of each blog in the blogroll also enables my future plan to write some additional code that checks each RSS feed for new content once a day, and order the blogroll by the date/time of the latest content of each blog, so that the more freshly updated blogs are at the top of the list. I’ll probably also add something that hides blogs that are returning errors.