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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Blogrolls grow up to become feedrolls?

You know, after spewing out that feedroll last night, I came to the realization that I just track way too many people and things to ever really have a sane yet comprehensive blogroll that covers it all. (And by sane I mean: Suitable for inclusion in the traditional sidebar position.)

I could work up a "best of" subset from that list, but then I start remembering this past Spring's blogroll sturm und drang and don't even want to get into picking cool kids or granting googlejuice favors. And besides, at that point, the culling would make it miss the whole point of representing my attention, which is what suckered me into this line of tinkering to begin with.

So, maybe I won't ever have a blogroll. Instead, my feedroll will just morph into an old-school "links" or "elsewhere" page. If I publish and maintain such a page, you'd never have to wait on me to upload or submit any OPML: Just find or ask me for my site's URL, visit my site, and scoop up my shared public feedroll.

It's small-s-semantic-web-o-riffic.

It could be linked into my home page and every blog entry with an autodiscovery method similar to my Atom and RSS feeds. Parse that, and you've got my declarations of attention. Spider it periodically into the future, and you've got constant updates. If I get ambitious, maybe I'll look into SSE extensions in an RSS feed behind it.

Of course, I realize that OPML could be handled this way too—but my microformatted feedroll will be a human-browsable dessert topping and machine-parseable floor wax, all in one!

Archived Comments

  • Bill Seitz

    I have a tiny unmaintained list on my home page, and link there to my BlogLines subscription list. (Since BlogLines lets you flag feeds as Private, you get some filtering there.)

  • Alex Schroeder

    I think blogrolls with more than 5 items are useless unless they are commented.

    Let me check my own blogroll... ;)

  • Alex Schroeder

    Damn, my notes on each feed are not exported by BlogLines. Instead of writing a tool to splice my notes into the HTML, I decided to send them a feature request instead. :)