A Personal Blog
Ensight Blogroll Goes Hi-Tech
I’ve finally put the Ensight blogroll through BlogRolling for ease of management. I’d never seen the benefit before, but it truly does give you a much easier way to manage your blogroll than doing it manually through MT.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Jeremy Wright on October 31, 2003 at 2:10 pm, and is filed under From My Life. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site. |
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about 8 years ago
I have been using the blogroll plugin (http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/blogroll.php), which allows me to maintain it based upon my current OPML feed in my news aggregator. My frustration with blogrolling was that most sites did not have the link (Blogroll Me), which meant I had to configure them manually. Plus more than once the blogrolling server has been slow like it was yesterday. (http://www.blogrolling.com/news.phtml) The one thing I truly miss however is the ability to know when a link has been updated recently.
about 8 years ago
Jeremy: I’ve thought about adding the blogrolling plug-in to my site, but I’m not sure what the advantages are. Would you mind expanding a bit on why you like it and what features are especially useful? i respect your tech judgment from reading your blog, so I would appreciate some more details!
about 8 years ago
Hey, I bet the people at Bloggertalk would like to hear about your experiences with this. :)
about 8 years ago
Hey Stephen,
Sure. Here was my experience with blogrolling purely in MT. I’d find a site, like the site, login to MT, open templates, click on the PHP Index template, go to the area I had to edit, add in the new link, save the template and rebuild the homepage.
That’s … 10 steps. And if you find 5-10/week it can be cumbersome.
With blogrolling there’s a bookmarklet so if I find a site I like I click the bookmarklet (in IE, I’m sure it works in others), click OK to add and I’m done.
Also, if you pay the 20$/year fee (which I will pay if I still like it in a few weeks) you get access to some very good features.
My favourites are multiple blogrolls (like one for each category like you and I do … or I used to), an OPML export so you can just get your aggregator info from your actual blogroll (very useful as I’m just getting into aggregators starting last night), etc.
So yeah, good stuff. I’d say I’m about 85% happy. The interface is a touch clunky, but most of my unhappiness is that I had to compromise a few things to use the free version of blogrolling. Obviously if I like it that much I’ll pay the fee and my happiness will go up to about 95%.
Pete: sure, I’ll post this :)
about 8 years ago
If you want a disadvantage…
You’re entirely at the whim of somebody else. There are enough variables as it is — MovableType not working properly, server failing, etc., that adding another external one is probably an unnecessary evil.
As a matter of fact (and to explain why I brought this up), their server was just lagging (or something else was the matter) and the page froze while loading. Granted, I’m using IE right now, but still…
The idea is cool, though. :-)
(Provided you don’t tell anybody, I’ll be releasing a blog application by the first quarter of ’04 and you’ve inspired me to create something similar but built-in. ;-))
about 8 years ago
If people continue to experience problems I’ll disconnect BR and simply write my own script that does the same thing.
about 8 years ago
It seems fine now; it’s quite possible there was just a temporary hiccup.
Just make sure that, whatever you do, you have something handy like this. ;-) It can save quite a bit of time!
about 8 years ago
Seeing as how you’re getting into RSS aggregators, you may just want to have your RSS aggregator generate an OPML file, and then use a simple PHP/Perl script to automatically generate a list… works for me.
about 8 years ago
Yeah, I’ve been thinking of it.
I may end up writing my own app where the RSS Aggregator and the blogroll happen from the same source database, and I can one-click add to that DB (and hence both)…
Thinking about it as I see how this could easily become addictive.
about 7 years ago
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