Teach42

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!