The way of the blogroll

Inspired by a mea culpa blogroll post on my friend MTFF's most excellent blog, I thought that this may be a good point at which to lay out the LLG policy on blogrolls.

I have more or less stopped regularly maintaining the LLG reciprocal blog roll which lurks at the bottom of this page. It's just a bit out of control now. I do get the odd request for inclusion which I file in a dedicated folder and every two or three months I go through it and add and subtract as necessary.

Instead of using blogrolls to keep track of other blogs as I did in the days when LLG was a tiny blog, I now use an RSS reader – Google Reader in my case, Bloglines, previously, where feeds to hundreds of blogs to which I have subscribed are aggregated so that I can read all the latest blog entries in one convenient place. I have a folder for everyone that leaves comments regularly on my blog so that I can repay the favour when I can, one for other fashion blogs, one for everyday reads, one for everyday miscellany and so on. If I were to use blogrolls on LLG to do this, the lists would run pages long.

I choose not to use Blogger Following for the same reason, although I make it available for my readers who do choose to do so: the list would be too long to manage. (I will also be leaving Blogger in the near future, so it makes sense to have my blog lists held externally.)

So don’t assume that because you aren’t on a blogroll on LLG or that I haven’t ‘Followed’ you, that I don’t read you – ten to one, I’ll be voraciously reading your latest posts through my RSS reader.

I do have two blogrolls which are relatively up to date: the list of my personal friends who blog, because otherwise they’d be lost in the endless blogroll at the bottom of LLG; and the Thank you for Mentioning LLG list, which acts as a personal recommendation & thank you to those blogs or websites and an aide memoire for me of the things that have been said about LLG out there in the ether.

But there are often omissions – if you don’t use Blogger Following, adding blogs to a blogroll is a bit more complicated than a one click action and, most importantly, don’t forget that LLG is not a paid project, so money work has to take precedence over blog admin, much as I wish that wasn’t the case.

So, if you are someone with whom I have a proper two way relationship, ether or real world, and I haven’t included you, prod me – as MTFF did recently and tell me, rather than glowering away in the ether. I’ll be grateful, mortified, and do my best to rectify it immediately.