A Bit of Tidying

Finding nothing immediately compelling to write about tonight and remembering that I needed to do some blog template maintenance anyway, I decided to tackle the cumulatively formidable tasks of (1) adding the O-Listers to my blogroll, (2) removing links to inactive or nonexistent blogs, (3) changing links to blogs that have moved, and (4) reorganizing the blogroll.

In addition to the remaining O-Listers I know about, I have added three other blogs -- An American Expat in Southeast Asia; Observations on Life, the Universe, and Everything by Brad Eisenhauer; and Al-Kafir Akbar, by Tom Stelene.

Notable moves include Kapitalismus Magazin, which made the leap to Word Press; Tom Rowland, who had been blogging at The View from Here and can now be found at A Writer's Way; and the authors of The Primacy of Awesome, who will take up pen names when they resume their craft elsewhere.

For the first time, I have, as sentimental as I am, bitten the bullet and actually pruned my blogroll. The blogs I had listed as "Retirees" before, along with a few that have been either nonexistent or inactive for a long time, and one that just closed shop, are now listed here. (This list is reachable from the last entry of the blogroll as well.)

The reorganization eliminates my division of blogs into categories, which was becoming less and less useful the longer the list of "Fellow Travellers" got. The alphabetical division makes it far easier to locate other blogs you might wish to visit by visually dividing the list.

On balance, I am quite happy with the results. While I follow most blogs through a feed reader these days, I want my readers to be able to find value in the blogroll. Now that it's easier to browse for interesting links (and return to them later) -- and all the links point to actual, living blogs -- I think it fulfills that purpose again.

Finally, I no longer will be using the Blogrolling service to add new blogs. Back before Google improved Blogger to the point that editing the template became easy, the best way to add reciprocal links was to use Blogrolling. Now, it is actually easier just to add the new links directly to the template. I have decided to indicate my most recent additions with the word "new" before the link to the blog.

I had to do lots of moving. If I linked to you before and you've blogged in the past six months, you should still be on the list. If I dropped you, it was an accident that I can easily fix if you let me know.

-- CAV