New feature: Blogroll on home page

Written by Adrian Holovaty on September 29, 2002

I've finally added a blogroll to this site -- that is, a collection of links to other sites that are similar to this one. Thanks to blo.gs, I'm able to display the last-updated time of each blog and rank them in descending order by that value. The list is updated automatically on the 45-minute mark, 24 hours a day, and it appears only on the home page in order to reduce clutter.

God knows this will be a huge time saver for me, considering how often I check these blogs throughout the day. I hope it'll help you, too.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to add all my favorite blogs, because not all of them ping blo.gs or weblogs.com when they're updated. (Pinging is a way of alerting a central server when your blog has changed. The server keeps a record of blogs' last-updated times and provides this information to anyone who wants it.) If you operate a weblog and don't offer this functionality, I encourage you to check it out. No programming needed; just go to the blo.gs ping form page and submit your information into that quick-and-easy form each time you update. Of course, the process can be automated as well.

On a more technical note: Because the blogroll is a list of items, it's coded as such; it uses the unordered-list tag, UL. Therefore it's accessible and semantically correct. Also, I've made the timestamps into label elements so users of modern graphical browsers can click on them. (See yesterday's entry.)

Comments

Posted by karl on September 30, 2002, at 5:50 p.m.:

http://www.la-grange.net/web/pingWeblog is a perl program I have done for pings, it needs polishing but it helps you to ping some weblogs directory at the same time.

Posted by Rich on January 3, 2003, at 3:09 p.m.:

Matt Bean has written a quick and dirty PHP function to update Weblogs.com. Handy if you've coded your own CMS in PHP but, like me, aren't too hot on getting PHP to do stuff with XML, HTTP, etc.

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