There has been a lot of talk recently about blogrolls, they seem to be making a comeback.
That's good!
As always, Dave Winer is taking a 'fresh look' over at blogroll.social by combining a roll with a feed reader. Rather than just seeing a list of blogs you can drill down to see recent posts for each.
For a while, I've been calling my own /reader a quasi-blogroll — it is a public/private list of blogs/feed reader where anyone can see recent posts from each of the sites listed within a certain time frame (rather than the last 5 posts shown on Dave's.) /reader displays them as a river but you can also select each blog individually.
As I've mentioned before, I was originally inspired by Tom Critchlow's post Increasing the surface area of blogging in which he said:
I think there’s something quietly radical about making your feed reader open by default
Being public/private means that anyone can see what's there while I can still mark items as read providing two distinct views.
I've been considering a change to the UI for /reader, especially on larger screens, to persistently show the list of blogs (I don't think it would really work on mobile) so that it performs better as a blogroll and the list of sites is more visible without having to expand the menu tray.
That will probably be next on my list once I've finished mucking about with Carousel.
# TIL that if you dynamically add elements with HTMX attributes or add HTMX attributes to existing elements you have to use htmx.process() to initialise them, for example:
myDiv = document.getElementById('div_id'); myDiv.setAttribute("hx-target", "this");
myDiv.setAttribute("hx-trigger", "dblclick");
myDiv.setAttribute("hx-get", "new_page.php");
htmx.process(myDiv);
I really like (and miss) blogrolls. Especially the really long ones people used to have in their sidebars. They were a great way of discovering new sites that you had a reasonable chance of liking. And now, in the age of Google search, where all the best, personal stuff is buried under mountains of commercial "content", we probably need them more than ever.
The thing that stops me adding one is the worry that I might offend someone if I don't include them, or if, for whatever reason, I add and later remove them.
I read blogs for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes only for a period of time. Deciding which ones to make public is a bit fraught.
I hear you. I think that's why the 'readroll' approach is quite good as you're just listing what you read. This is bound to change periodically so the roll is a point-in-time thing.