WP Social Blogroll
I am not a great fan of Blogger as a platform.
I admit I have never used it with an account of my own, but I do know that it can be difficult commenting on Blogger site. There is one feature of it that I like however and that is the ability to display links along with the title and time of their last post. It was a feature I envied and finally I found a solution.
I installed WP-Social-Blogroll on Head Rambles.
I had a philosophy of linking to any site that linked to Rambles and this led to a rather long list. I therefore set the list up on its own page. At the time, I could not get the damned thing to work in the way I wanted, as it insisted on displaying the links and the icon, but it left out the latest post, the author and the date. I left it and promised myself I would address it at another time but never did.
Recently it was pointed out to me that the Links Page wasn’t showing any links at all. I dived in and for the live of me couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working. I decided to install the plugin again from scratch.
Originally I just set up a normal page and included the Social Blogroll code. They did recommend that I install it from a template however. I tried that [I had never used a template page before but it was simple enough] and the links appeared, but still without title, author or date. I was back to square one again.
I scoured the Internet but could find nothing relevant. I don’t know how I found the solution, but I did. I was using the wrong API key from Google! I set up a new key, using the precise link to the Links Page and inserted it. It worked perfectly.
The problem then was that I suddenly discovered just how many sites hadn’t been updated for months or even years. The only thing is to remove all the links that haven’t been updated in [say] the last six months. That is going to be a big job.
Maybe I should have left the plugin unfixed?!
Google Reader includes a button to dispaly all of ones reading list by length of time since last post – well, the top forty of each button.
Weeding out the long time no write blogs is fairly painless.
The problem with the Google Reader list is that it refers to my RSS feeds and not the Links. In other words, there may be sites out there that I link to but that aren’t on my Reader (and vice Versa).
There are two ways of editing the redundant links – either I edit each link individually which is tedious, or I download the Table, edit the file and upload again. The latter is a lot faster but also error prone.
I better get my thumb out.
Heh! You know you want to tell us more about your massive amounts of memory? 😉
I’m another one for the Google Reader method. Since most sites I would pay attention to have an RSS feed anyway, I can just sub to it and it will appear on my own links page.
Sure it may bottle up your Reader, although I pretty much skim everything that comes in there these days anyway.
I think the only main issue with it is that it doesn’t have the favicons appear in the widget.
I’m a great fan of RSS readers myself. The only problem there is that I’m a Firefox fan and for some very strange reason they have dropped the RSS icon in the address bar. At the moment I’m using Firefox 8 and the icon still hasn’t made a return.
They seem to be trying to push us into alternatives like Facebook and Twitter. That ain’t gonna happen here!