Some time ago, George wrote about my faulty blog list:
Pulled up your profile page and started checking out all the blogs you have listed there. Half of them exist but are empty, half of them haven’t had anything posted for years, and half of them post so sporadically, I wonder why they bother. Yes, I know, too many halves.
Reminds me I should go clean up my own link lists, and I will. Any day now.
BTW, I didn’t check George’s links.
Despite some hyperbole, he was correct that a handful of the websites I linked to were dead. Easily remedied.
The bigger problem was the nearly two dozen that hadn’t published anything in a long while. My difficulty is that, in many cases, I had encouraged those people to start or continue their blogs, commenting frequently. So, I had a degree of ownership in the process. Often, they were my friends and good acquaintances.
I suppose the blogroll is an archaic relic of years past, when blogging was cool. As mentioned, I would pore through my friend Fred Hembeck’s roster of links when I started blogging in 2005. I made several blogger buddies, some of whom I’m still in contact with. BTW, Fred’s list is now a historic record.
Still, I made the painful decision to zap the blog links that hadn’t been updated in the past two years. Afterward, I remembered that I didn’t have to DELETE them; I could just make them invisible. D’oh!
Add the daughter
On the other hand, I’ve added my daughter’s student portfolio from Hampshire College for Fall 2022 – Spring 2026. It was an exercise she initially did for one class but ultimately created for her whole college tenure.
Come back, Shane
All of this is to say that if you would like me to link to your blog/webpage, please let me know, especially if I have previously linked to it.
Oh, one exception to my purge of links. I’ve kept the Schomburg Center Black Liberation Reading List of 95 books because it’s still useful.
Also, my high school classmate Armen Boyajian, who started following my blog during COVID, has a YouTube channel. He died at the end of 2022; I see no reason to take his page off the list.