This site started out on Movable Type years ago .. When they changed their licensing I switched to WordPress.. And it was on WordPress for a couple of years.. until it wasn’t anymore.
So when I switched it to MovableType back in 2007 the “blogroll” I’d been maintaining disappeared, as MT didn’t really have a way of handling it (well it did, but it was messy) so I had a couple of links in a widget and that was it.
Now I’m back using WordPress which ships with the option to publish a “blogroll” or any set of links into the site’s sidebar. (I’ve currently got a very very small one .. )
But is there any point?
Do people actually look at them?
Do people want to be included in them?
If I published one would you want to be included? (Assuming I have some idea who you are and actually want to link to you .. )
I used to have one on my sidebar but it got a tad large so I put it on a page of its own. Recently I have been tweaking it and have now gotten the ‘Blogger’ style links with latest post titles which makes for interesting browsing.
The page doesn’t get that many visitors [around 0.4%!] but I use it occasionally myself to keep an eye on the sites that aren’t in my feed reader.
On the other hand, I seem to get a lot of visits from other peoples blogrolls so I suppose I should really put mine back on the front page again, thereby screwing up the site.
*sigh*
How does a blogroll differ from a links widget? I notice quite a few people using networked blobs these days which is a similar idea.
Gordon
In the case of MT the widget was managed very manually ie. I had to edit HTML to add new links to it.. I’m not sure about “networked blobs”, but I assume that’s some kind of 3rd party widget that you embed? In which case you’re relying on someone else to handle the data for you and it could also impact how quickly your site loads ..
Michele
Grandad
As an aside, are you seeing your traffic going up, or going down? Or has it remained stable?
Michele
Networked Blogs allegedly is a good traffic driver. People signing up to it are forced to like a certain number of blogs. Not sure how useful that traffic is though.
And the HTC spell checker is pants, doesn’t even have “blogs” in its dictionary.
Gordon – ah – I think I’ve seen a couple of services using a similar concept..
As for your HTC – at least the mobile theme for here works 🙂
M
A quick look at stats shows it’s pretty insignificant for my site – I find swearing or cute pixel graphics are much more effecitive. But, it doesn’t hurt and for the casual browser it might be useful for them to find new, interesting and related content. I ditched it from my site because I wanted a bare-bones look, but if you want to link me it’s http://www.irishstu.com/stublog
I ditched it from mine as I don’t really want to be driving traffic away from my site. Also the number I had on it was rather silly 20 – 30 links which pushes the page footer down. Now nothing wrong with that but I think it’ll be going into a sub page as was mentioned above. If people want to see what I’m reading they can go there.
James
What level of clicks were the links getting?
Michele
TBH not sure doubtful that many it’s not like my personal blog does large volumes of traffic … still a link away from my site isn’t something I want people seeing right away.
Traffic levels? Very hard to tell. The only long term stats I have are from Google Analytics and they apparently changed their algorithm at the start of the year [my page impressions doubled overnight]. I would say they are fairly steady. Probably an increase but definitely not a decrease.