How to Create a Dynamic Blogroll in 5 Minutes
In the early days of blogging a blogroll was something cool, something everybody had to have installed. People blogging a while notice one thing though:
Conventional static blogrolls do not work. Nobody clicks the links.
Blogrolls are only important for egos and Google but rarely a user does indeed use them. Also often they are just hopelessly outdated linking to blogs that didn't publish stuff for months.
So why aren't dynamic blogrolls everywhere by now? Dynamic blogrolls that update by themselves and display only current postings? Well, I don't know. I only know that I rarely see something you might call a dynamic blogroll.
I wanted to implement a dynamic blogroll on my SEO 2.0 blog for a while already. Now I did. I tell you how:
As I wanted to introduce some ways to cooperate more efficiently among my peers I decided to make a dynamic blogroll for the blogs of friends and allies of the SEO 2.0 blog. For testing purposes I just took the 4 of them:
- Mine ;-)
- SEO Smarty by seosmarty
- Small Business SEM by pleeker
- BlogWell by Lid
I went to feedkiller
I entered "SEO 2.0 Friends" into the text box below the text
"
I put the feed URLs inside the inputs below the text
"
http://feeds.feedburner.com/seo20
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoSmarty
I clicked "add more" twice and then entered
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SmallBusinessSem
http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogwell
I clicked on "build it!"
I clicked on the feed URL and after an ad ended up seeing the actaul feed.
I copied the URL in the browser bar.
I headed over to my WordPress admin dashboard.
I went to "Widgets" in the Appearance menu.
I dragged and dropped the "RSS" widget on my sidebar.
I clicked on the "RSS" widget and
I entered "http://www.feedkiller.com/files/rss.php?id=15354" into the first input.
I entered "SEO 2.0 Friends" into the second input.
I saved it.
DONE.
You can see it on the right in the sidebar of the homepage at the bottom.
Now does that sound complicated? Even if, it was not. Drop your useless static blogroll and get a dynamic one.
Last updated November 17th, 2010: Removed broken feed and used feedkiller instead of Feedjumbler (RIP!).
Hi Tad,
I tried to get the blogrolls to be a little more dynamic by feeding them all into one large aggregator. You’re one of the gatekeepers, so your dynamic blogroll is polled each day to see which sites you rate.
http://socialblogroll.com/br/gatekeepers
http://socialblogroll.com
Each blogroll vote gives a blog more visibility in the system and allows us to have a top 100 listing system.
http://socialblogroll.com/br/top100
Thanks Nick, noticed it in my referrers already but I’m not sure it is really useful for my purposes.
[...] How to Create a Dynamic BlogRoll Using Feedburner – it takes 5 [...]
Hi Tad
This is something I had never heard of..Cool beans. Thanks *-)
I wish I would’ve heard of this BEFORE last night when I was adding nearly 90 feeds to Bloglines :-(
Well, not sure if this solution can replace Bloglines…
That’s a really great trick! I’ll try it out.
Does it influence the load time and bandwidth of the blog?
I did not notice any change.
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I agree that the blogroll of old is not the greatest. he dynamic version is gaining popularity and will hopefully be a replacement.
What I have done is a rolodex – like a blogroll of old with enough details about each name so a decision can be made it a visit seems worthwhile.
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