TL;DR

• A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs or websites. You can find mine here.
• They’re making a comeback; they’re typically curated by a person and not by an algorithm.
• You should get one for your site. And tell your friends.

Blogroll!

I keep lists of a lot of things. Amongst them was one I called “nice websites”, where I kept pages that I liked and drew inspiration from, and had some features in it that I wanted to build or emulate in my own work. The list was over 10 years old (though still maintained), and contained over 150 links. I decided I needed to clean it up and make it public, both as a way to publicise people’s hard work, and to play around with Astro’s content collections some more.

It was getting too complex. I looked for a more common feature or design pattern to showcase websites that I liked, and link back to them. I remembered that webrings were a thing, but weren’t quite what I was looking for. Then I came across a post called the social web by Manuel Moreale, which coincidentally took me to his blogroll. And here we are.

What are they?

Blogrolls are a simple list of blogs that the site owner curates to whatever degree they like. Similar to webrings, they were a method to help readers discover similar content on other websites, if they enjoyed the website they’re on. Usually, there’d be no automation involved either. No algorithms, just people lifting people.

At some point, these became ways for crawlers and bots to figure out how to map content and optimise the content that search engines would give you. Handy at the time, but maybe slightly destructive further down the road. Which is why it’s so nice that it’s become another indieweb tool that’s returned to people’s websites today.

Get rollin’

If you want to be on my blogroll, please contact me. Similarly, if there are rolls you want to recommend, rolls you want me to read or ones you think I should be on, please let me know!