Rethinking Blogrolls

When I first started this blog, I decided to link to the Kenilworthian Blogroll. This was for reasons I noted in my first post on the subject, A Note About Blogrolls.

As things evolved, it was not a clever strategy. That particular blogroll does not appear to have been updated since I first linked to it. For example, it still lists blogs that were once on Modblog.com, a service that disappeared around the beginning of 2006. As most people who maintain lists of web links eventually discover, they are easy to initiate -- you merge the links from several existing sources and eliminate the duplicates -- but difficult to maintain. You have to check the existing links periodically to see if they are still alive, while adding new links when you become aware of new resources.

When I started writing monthly about the chess blogosphere in Chess Blog Tripping, I developed the habit of refreshing my list of blogs as the first step to preparing a new article. Why not publish that monthly list? I decided to do that and to keep the lists on my personal site...

Index of /cfaa/blogroll
http://www.mark-weeks.com/cfaa/blogroll/

...using the filename BYYYY-MM.HTM, which should be self-explanatory. It's not an elegant solution, but it has the advantage of keeping an ongoing history of blog activity.

Along with the blog name and domain, the list indicates if it was flagged as a top blog ('*') on About Chess, gives the date of the last post on the day I ran through all blogs, and shows a count of the number of posts made by that blog during the month covered by the list. I drop blogs from the list after they have been inactive for six months.