Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit

Well, today’s challenge is the first of a two-parter. The longer you have a blog, the more cluttered your sidebar winds up. New social site? New widget! And it all adds up. Pretty soon your sidebar is a veritable circus of colors, banners and links. It’s time to reign it in, but if we’re going to do it we should do it right. And that means taking a thorough look at what we have there, determining what can be eliminated, what can be consolidated, and what should be… pruned. Which leads us to your blogroll.

The blogroll is one of the most popular sidebar items with good reason. It let’s people know who you read, where you get your information from and who you recommend to other people. There are many tools that make it easy to keep up… But therein lies the problem. For example, I use Bloglines for my blogroll. Anytime I add an EdTech blog to my aggregator, *bam* it appears in my blogroll. Delicious, Google Reader, and many others allow you to do the same thing. Trouble is, that means it’s just a little too easy to keep adding blogs to it, and after a while it sorta of loses it’s value. Looking at my blogroll as it stands right now, it’s just a series of links to a bazillion EdTech blogs. Unless it’s deliberate, it’s meaningless. So it’s time to do some trimming.

There are several ways to do a blogroll. Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Edublogs all support blogrolls natively. Or you can use third party tools like Google Reader, Bloglines, Delicious, or any number of others. To be honest, the tool that use doesn’t matter so much. The important thing is selecting what you want to list there, and how you want to organize it. Do you want to list a few of your favorite blogs to read? Do you want to list bloggers that you admire? Perhaps you just want to share your favorites in a specific niche, like Special Ed or ESL. Really, it’s entirely up to you and there’s no wrong way to do. So long as you do it deliberately and maintain it.

Maintain it? Absolutely. Sometimes good blogs go stale. And if the blogger hasn’t posted since 2006, does it really still deserve a spot on your blogroll? Most likely not. While your pruning, you just might find yourself feeling a little guilt. You really like ‘John’, but you haven’t read his blog in who knows how long. Should he still be in your blogroll? In my opinion, if you even have to wonder, go ahead and take it out. If you share a sprawling list of 50 blogs there, it’s overwhelming and deters people from exploring them. If you have a concise list of 10 blogs, people see that these are personal recommendations from you and will be more prone to clicking through. It’s more meaningful that way. So don’t feel guilty. It’s your blog darnit! Do what you need to do. And if you’re going to have more than 10-15 of them, consider breaking them up into multiple categories so they’re more manageable.

If you don’t have any you want to remove any, at least do a ‘freshness’ check to make sure all of the blogs you’re linking to are still up and are active!

Good luck! And don’t forget, if you haven’t joined the wiki yet, stop by and list yourself there. And get ready for tomorrow, when we give the rest of your sidebar the royal treatment!

And now I’m off to do some trimming myself!

11 Comments

mwright103
11/12/2008

Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit /Teach42/ – Well, today’s challenge is the first of a … http://tinyurl.com/5h4fy9

Darren Draper
11/12/2008

If you had kept your blogroll trimmed to 10-15 blogs like you’ve suggested, I wouldn’t feel so bad about not making the cut. But seeing that I’m not even in your top 50 really cuts me deep.

I’ve also got another book you need to add to your list: Tribes, by Seth Godin. Definitely right up your alley. Get the link to the free audible version @ iJohn’s blog.

Darren Draper´s most recent blog post.. Learning By Immersion

Sue Waters
11/12/2008

Shaking my head — can’t believe you are still using Bloglines when it’s pretty much almost broken and struggles to update feeds.

Anyway there is no way I’m removing any blogs from my feed (unless I don’t read them) because the first place I search for information when writing posts is my Google Reader and it always brings up great information.

So my solution is I use Google Reader to create my blog roll with different types of blogs in different folders. Then instead of having my blogroll on my sidebar I have it embedded in a page with a link to the page from my side bar. Readers can choose to look through the list or check out the shared posts. Off course with the size of my list it is better to be a letter at the beginning of the alphabet like a D say compared to say a T

For me blogrolls take up too much valuable real estate in the sidebar.

Here’s how to create a blogroll using Google Reader

Sue Waters´s most recent blog post.. Interested In FREE Online PD This Friday?

JenW
11/13/2008

Well, this one was easy……..
trimmed down to 18.

What I found interesting is that my bloglines account does not equal my blog roll………I have many more in bloglines.

So, I might start rotating blogrolls every once in a while….

And for now, I have found a theme which works for me……(FOR NOW!)

Until, of course, I read your post on tweaking the sidebar even more!

Thanks again for sharing, Steve!
Jen

JenW´s most recent blog post.. There is NO WAY…..

Day Twelve - Thirty Days To A Better Blog « Virtual High School Meanderings
11/13/2008

[...] Day eleven in the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger series was yesterday and asked us to look atDay 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit. Essentially, we were asked to size up our Blogroll and figure out if they were all still valid or [...]

Joel Zehring
11/13/2008

I use FriendFeed as a my dynamic blogroll. Google Reader shared items and Delicious bookmarks show up live, so I have a constant flow of specific sites that interest me.

I notice you have a FriendFeed widget showing twitter posts, and then a twitter widget with different posts. What gives?

Joel Zehring´s most recent blog post.. Making waves, spring toy-style

Dan Callahan
11/13/2008

Well, this one was super-easy. I try to keep mine extremely tight, linking to blogs that I find genuinely interesting due to insight, writing style, or presentation. If anything, this made me realize I needed to add a link, which brought me up to a whopping 9 links, only one of which is an edublog.

PS: a link to that “most recent blog post” plugin you’re using would be awesome. couldn’t find it easily, and it’s a great idea for seeing what people have out there.

Dan Callahan´s most recent blog post.. Child’s Play!

Jennifer Dorman
11/13/2008

I actually stopped using Bloglines about a year ago, dropping it in favor of Google Reader. Since I use so many other Google apps, Reader just seemed natural. I did look through my EdTech folder, which is the one I used to create my blogroll widget on my blog. I found some feed that hadn’t updated since the summer and others that I realized I really didn’t read regularly. I did also add some new feeds for blogs that I discovered through the 30D2BBB process

Jennifer Dorman´s most recent blog post.. What is Your Blogging Type?

Sean Nash
11/13/2008

I have mine at 26. I am pretty good with those for now. Considering the fact that I only created it back in April (i certainly read & trolled blogs before then), is isn’t so bad.

For me, those are the names of my “go-to” folks. Really, it serves two purposes:

1) a recommendation list. i frequently aim local folks to my blogroll for resources.

2) a quick go-to list for ME to click when i get a minute of sanity in my day. my reader is just NOT appropriate for that. it is really an “incoming bookmark” of all blogs i find interesting and do not want to lose.

In April when I set it up, I added probably ten or twelve of the big reads for me. Since then, I have added there slowly.

I am sitting down to work with an instructional coach tomorrow who is just beginning a new blog and keeping these ideas in mind to begin will will be good.

Though I will try to convince her to not add anything here until she first becomes a reader of blogs. I think adding links here just to have them is silly in many ways. She is jumping into the blogosphere to first serve an immediate instructional need for her staff.

It is a good first step. Heck, any first step is a good first step, right?

Sean Nash´s most recent blog post.. And what do we teach our children?

Natalie
11/13/2008

I’m still adding blogs to my list. I guess I hadn’t thought about using the Blog Roll to show others what I am reading. I did a little trim a few weeks back and took out five blogs that I wasn’t reading much and the writers weren’t updating. Felt bad though.

Natalie´s most recent blog post.. Google Rocks…in the Ruins!

Jim Beeghley
11/13/2008

Hi have always kept my blogroll short and to the point. Same with my sidebars simply because I don’t like all the clutter. This was an easy one for me. Good thing too because I needed time to catch up.

Jim

Jim Beeghley´s most recent blog post.. Using Poetry to teach the Civil War

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