What are blogrolls?
A blogroll is a curated list of blogs or websites that a blog author recommends, usually on a dedicated page of their blog. They serve dual purposes: expressing the blogger's interests and provide readers with additional sources of content.
This is an example from https://www.benkuhn.net/. The real thing is much longer, and provides a great list of blogs to check out, separated into multiple categories.
Blogrolls started in the early days of blogging, particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At that time, blogs were a new form of web publishing, and bloggers often formed informal networks by linking to each other's sites. This is related to the concept of web rings.
Back then, blogrolls were critical for forming and maintaining blogging communities. Bloggers would link to each other, creating networks that helped readers discover new sources of content. Over time, however, the adoption of social media platforms and algorithmic content discovery methods led to a decline in the popularity of blogrolls.
The value of blogrolls
Content discovery, finding high quality feeds to subscribe to, is one of the biggest problems in the whole RSS and web feed ecosystem.
Blogrolls provide a list of additional sources of content for readers to discover. They can go through the list of blogs and websites, check them out, and see if they are interesting and relevant to them.
Since blogrolls list the blogs and websites that the author reads, they serve as a recommendation as well. If the author writes high-quality articles, it can be assumed that they also read high-quality information.
Technical implementation
There’s no specification or format that blogrolls must follow. In their simplest form they could be text files where every line has a link to a blog.
The most common format is a separate HTML page, where each entry contains the name of the blog and the link to its main page. Often also a short description of the blog and why the person likes it.
A more powerful method to implement blogrolls is with OPML files. Virtually every feed reader supports importing feeds from OPML files, which makes it possible to import all feeds of a blogroll in one go, and thereby streamlines subscribing to whole blogrolls.
The OPML format is relatively simple, so it is possible to create OPML files by hand. However, there are also specialized tools to create blogrolls, which simplify the creation process. These tools also export OPML files for easier interoperability with feed readers.
One such tool is the Lighthouse blogroll editor.
It includes a couple quality of life features that make the process much smoother:
- Import feeds from other OPML files
- Automatically find feeds from website URLs
- Show additional feed information like publishing frequency
- Newsletter support via built-in email-to-rss functionality
- Forking of blogrolls others have created
Current state and vision
In the current landscape, blogrolls are less visible than they once were. The rise of social media, algorithmic discovery engines, and centralized platforms has reduced the usage of independent blogrolls, and today most are maintained by enthusiasts, idealists, or those with a strong belief in the principles of the open web.
There are many potential use-cases of blogrolls that are unused in the current feed reader landscape.
Instead of only listing the blogs that an author subscribes to themselves, knowledgeable people in a specific area could create blogrolls for that area. This would make sure that the listed sources are high-quality, and therefore simultaneously promote high-quality content (as opposed to Google which only finds SEO-optimized slob).
Forking (i.e. copying and editing) blogrolls can also be a great way to have a starting point and put a personal spin on it. A mid-level software engineer for example could start with a blogroll created by an expert, remove blogs that are too detailed to provide value, add blogs that publish useful content for mid-level engineers, and with that create a new blogroll that’s focused on mid-level engineers.
If blogrolls are hosted as OPML files under static URLs (similar to feeds) they can also be dynamic. If a user subscribes to an entire blogroll, and the creator of the blogroll adds a new feed, the user could be automatically subscribed to the feed as well. And if the author removes a feed, it can also be reflected.
Feed readers can accompany this feature with appropriate management tools to avoid abuse.
Conclusion
The open web has all the tools necessary to thrive. Standards for web feeds (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed) and feed exchange (OPML), concepts like blogrolls, and many people who are interested and invested in making it work.
RSS and Atom feeds are generated by virtually all CMS and blogging software, and many tools exist to convert websites into RSS feeds for the ones that don’t have native feeds.
The one remaining difficulty is discovery of feeds. And blogrolls have been the answer in the past, and can be once again.