Why is it that I will write 2011 on my checks until, oh about February 17, when I inexplicably revert to 2010?
Anyway, let me tell you what I’ve already done for the new year: I’ve changed my blog. I remember reading on Rose’s blog about why you should avoid sidebar blogrolls, having to do with search engines. But that’s not why I moved all my links.
It actually has to do with Arthur posing the question about the protocol for eliminating retired blogs back in early November. This reminded me that I was still using my Blogger blog, which has a function that allows the blogs to post in chronological order, by most recent, something not available when I started my blog. As I wrote to Arthur, “This had the dual goal of reminding me to go visit someone’s blog, while not having to go there if they haven’t posted for a week AND see if they’ve REALLY stopped posting for good when they say they have…I still use my old blog to visit you and other folks, because, if WordPress has this feature, I haven’t discovered it.”
So suddenly, about a month later, it became obvious what I should do: make my old blog at www.rogerowengreen.blogspot.com my blogroll! And because I wasn’t worried about style points, I could put all the blogs on the left side, where the blogposts usually would go, giving those links more room to breathe; the blog is still there, BTW, just pushed down. Meanwhile, on the right side, I still have links to web pages. The division is imperfect – the left side has links to blogs from my friends Fred and Daniel that don’t seem to be on an RSS feed. Meanwhile, Johnny B’s completed blog about early Elton John music I’m keeping on the right side.
This change has allowed me the pleasure to add more people to the blogroll, while finally deleting those folks who have actually quit blogging. I’m still not crazy about my category choices -‘Eclectic Folks’? – but I can live with it.
So what have YOU planned for the new year?
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2011 is a prime number year. The last one was 2003; the next will be 2017.
You could use the WP Social Blogroll plugin as I do on my site. This list the latest postings with titles and dates.
Ahhh! I’ve never looked since you’ve migrated to the new site, but I’ve wondered why I continue to consistently get hits from your old blog. Cool!
I moved my blogroll from my sidebar to an internal post some years ago…and then, about a year ago still, Blogger rolled out a “pages” feature, so I then migrated my blogroll to there.
On deletion of inactive blogs — I go through my blogroll and look at links two or three times a year. If I know the blogger personally in some way, I’m more likely to keep them blogrolled, and I do have a few on there that really do only update a few times a year. Others, though, I remove if they’ve been inactive for at least a few months. But when I remove them, I always bookmark those blogs in a folder on my computer I call “Inactive blogs”. And once in a GREAT while, I’ll go through those to see if any have come back to life. This happens rarely; I find that once bloggers vanish, they stay vanished.
I’d never heard of the “Page-Rank Leakage” issue (and it sounds like something you go to the doctor for…). I moved my links to a separate page like Jaquandor did and Rose advocates not for search engine issues, but just because I thought my sidebar was cluttered and made my blog more visually tiring. I’m going to thin the sidebar even more—eventually.
I think that the value of this sort of discussion is finding out what other bloggers do and why. Whether I follow their lead, adapt it or ignore it is beside the point: It gives me a new look at the process of blogging, and that keeps me interested. For me, that’s good enough.
3 resolutions – use less packaging stuff, eat healthily and sew! Oh and to continue saving Gotham City! Good one eh Robin! lol! Happy New Year Roger to you and yours. Dxx