On blog readers and blogroll etiquette

I use Bloglines as my day-to-day blog reading tool. It looks vaguely "Web 1.x" in it's design (I mean, who uses frames these days, tch!), and the colour scheme is awful, but I've yet to find another feed aggregator that matches it for speed, ease-of-use and robust functionality. There are probably readers out there that are better, but the ones I've tried aren't so much better that they make me feel like surmounting the inertia of "staying with what I'm used to".

If you're not yet using a blog aggregator to keep track of updates to this site (and all the other blog and news sites you read) I recommend setting up a free account with Bloglines. And once you have you can click this link to subscribe to this blog. Clever eh? ;-)

One of the things keeping me with Bloglines is that it runs my blogroll for me. A blogroll, for those not steeped in the terminology of the blogging, is that list of other blogs on the left hand side of my main blog page.

Basically I have set two folders of blogs in bloglines, one called (imaginatively) "Blogs", and the other called (slightly less imaginatively) "Other Blogs".

Using Bloglines's built-in Blogroll Wizard I've set it up so the list of blogs in my "Blogs" folder is replicated on my home page. And with a bit of CSS wizardry from Jessica I stripped out the tell-tale "Made by Bloglines" bit they stick in by default. Hey, I feel I've already given them enough plugs!

Because the folder in Bloglines is sorted by updatedness, my blogroll does too. Barring some glitches, the blogs at the top of the list are the most recently updated. I feel this is a fairly even-handed way to share out my "onward traffic". :-)

From time to time I look through my entire blog list in Bloglines and decide which items deserve promoting to the "Blogs" folder, hence getting a mention in my blogroll; and which should be demoted to the "other blogs" folder.

It's tricky. If I just listed all the blogs I subscribe to the list would be twice as long as the blog page. So I have to use a mental points system to decide who stays in and who goes. Points are scored for blogs that are:

• a good read
• being regularly updated
• relevant to my interests
• reasonably well-established (at least a few weeks old)
• linking to me

That last one is a bit of an awkward one. It would be wrong to only ever link to blogs that linked to me first, but equally it's wrong to link to someone just because they link to you. I'm a bit of a stickler for people at least linking somewhere outside their own site, even if it's not to me. I kinda believe that you only deserve traffic if you're willing to share it with others! So I usually make a judgement call based on that plus all the other criteria.

I went through the list today. Some blogs got promoted, some got dropped. If your blog's not on the list, then it's probably because it's fallen foul of one or more of my criteria, or I've just had a brain fart, or I don't know it exists. It's nothing personal. :-)

I probably worry about this kinda stuff too much. :-S