Another Boring Site Note
My blogroll (that list under “Regularly Read” in the side bar) was way, way out-of-date. I couldn’t face the thought of manually updating it, so I dumped my OPML file from Bloglines and used that to update my Blogrolling account. My Bloglines feeds are hardly up-to-the-minute, but they’re more accurate than what they replaced.
If you used to be on that list, but you’re not any more, there are several possible reasons. One, I pretty much only regularly read sites that offer RSS feeds. If you don’t have one, you wouldn’t be among my Bloglines feeds and thus I don’t read your site regularly. Two, you’re Fark, which I prefer to read in the browser. Three, I’ve just accidentally missed your site some time in the past. Four, your site wasn’t my bag. It’s other people’s bags, just not mine.
Thanks to some bizarre formatting issue, you’ll note that every tenth site in my blogroll is one point larger than the others. I will resolve this at some later date. For now, I think it’s charmingly eclectic. The whole thing is pretty unattractive at the moment anyway.
Two minor administrative notes. Flickr guys, I’ve been monitoring a couple of public photo feeds (such as this one). When I exported my OPML file from Bloglines, these feeds didn’t get processed correctly, and ended up as:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/
This may be a Bloglines problem, but everybody else’s feeds appear to have made it through okay, so I thought I’d mention it.
Secondly, RSS publishers, keep the contents of the <title> element relatively short. When doing this kind of automagical syndication, long titles result in an ugly sidebar. This may be specific to my design, but I had to go through and cut down a bunch of the feed titles. I’ll pick on Boris’s (or should I say, “B. Mann Consulting - Technology Consulting in Vancouver”) feed as an example. He’ll no doubt have a sound argument for the search engine optimization benefits of a longer title, to which I’ll have no valid rebuttal.
UPDATE: Not to be any more tedious than necessary, but I discovered that Bloglines provides blogrolling functionality natively. Once I removed a few compromising sites from Bloglines, I was able to go straight from them into my blogroll. This enables me to eliminate one layer of complexity–Blogrolling– from the mix, which is a good thing.
