Blog Azeroth

There's more blogs out there then there are players! Although it's probably not true, it does feel that way. Our blogrolls are getting more extensive by the week. Usually though, there are blogs that simply die out or no longer update and we prune those from our reading lists.

I found a handy plugin here that takes a certain number of links from your blogroll and displays them on the side widget at random.

http://www.goldfries.com/websites-blogg ... wordpress/

I'm definitely going to insert this on my blog at some point while I still compile my static blogroll page.

If you're interested, you can check out my sandbox:
http://zxc.worldofmatticus.com/

Check out the right hand side at the bottom.

My sandbox is basically a carbon copy of my current blog which isn't publicized or advertised at all. Any new plugins or designs I want to try, I upload it here first. I tweak with it, play with it, and see how it looks. If I'm satisfied with it, then I copy it over to my main site. This helps saves any embarrassing technical glitches. It's also a good way to share your source code and backend with other people in case theres a problem with your live site but can't afford to take it down for several hours.

Sometimes having another pair of eyes can help.

Phae helped me troubleshoot a few designer bugs and quirks on here before I modified and saved the changes live.

I have the blogrool problem huge, and I'm not sure what to do about it.

rankly, I still remember the charge I got when BRK emntioned my blog in a hollaback post, when I thought my only readers were my 5 friends...

Didn't realize that, if I visited his blog from the links on my blog, he was seeing that I linked to him.

I just don't feel right taking a link of, when that link represents someone that has a passion for the game, and is part of the community.

But, on the other hand... I don't want a 5 mile long blogroll forever, either.

I gots no clue what to do.

i like the idaa of a seperate blogroll page, with some pulled at random to the main page.

Just a reminder, if manually managing your blogroll becomes too much of a chore, several feed readers sport some kind of mechanisms allowing you to plug part or all of your reading lists into your blogrolls.

Google Reader is what I use for this but I know there's many others out there providing similar functionality.

I'm going to preface this by saying that my personal blogroll method is weird and I only did it that way to force myself to not forget how to use javascript and CSS.

I've noticed a couple blogs (notably Kestrel's) that have the blogroll condensed into categories and hidden by default in a sidebar. I love this method, and kind of stole it for my own blogroll. I still manually update my blogroll, but since I've organized it in categories and alphabetically after that and since my feed reader organizes blogs alphabetically, it's not hard at all for me to update the blogroll by hand.

And related to the sandbox, that's ingenious. I just mess around with the CSS and layout stuff in an HTML doc on my desktop. Your method sounds a lot more useful, I might have to steal it.

It's cool Trollin. That's why we're all here, to steal or share ideas =).

Trolling how'd you do that blogroll :O
Sure looks better then mine

For any who are curious, the plugin I use for my links is Enhanced Links, combined with Daiko's Text Widget.

I wrote a javascript function to change the visibility attribute of a div based on whether or not it's class contained a few characters for each class/category. Then I made the little buttons call the function with strings for the class.

The function is effectively:


The I made a bunch of divs with class names like "blogroll-pri-rog-lock" and then make buttons that called the functions "showBlogs("pri");", "showBlogs("lock"), etc that would show the div if it's class had the phrase in it.

It's all hand written, so I have to maintain it myself, but whatev, I likes it.

Love that function, Trollin, looks awesome! Well done

My blogroll list isn't that long at present, but when I get the new theme up and running, I'll have to see how it handles more in there.