Dynamic blogrolls

Friday, February 23, 2007 at 8:51 | Posted in Blogosphere, google, languages, rss feeds | 3 Comments

Inspired by the dynamic blogroll of Mein Parteibuch, I have deleted my old static blogroll and replaced it with a number of dynamic rolls. There are altogether five blogrolls divided by language. The languages are English, German, Finnish, Estonian and Scandinavian (that is Swedish, Norwegian and Danish in one roll).

The technical solution is very simple. For a while ago, I transfered all my RSS subscriptions from Bloglines to Google Reader where I sorted the subscriptions to folders based on the language of the blog. I then made the folders public whereby a public page was created on each of the folders. Those pages generate RSS feeds of their own and the blogrolls are based on those feeds.

Since I made some rearrangements among my subscriptions, some of the rolls may momentarily display a lot of posts from one single blog but as soon as new posts appear in the subscribed blogs, things should more or less automatically settle to normal. That is, each blogroll should display 10 most recent posts of the blogs concerned. So basically, whoever makes posts most frequently, has their site linked most often from my blogs.

At the moment my English and Finnish blogs display all of the five dynamic blogrolls while my Swedish blog shows the Scandinavian and English feeds. I have for the time being not included this feature in my Estonian blog, nor its mirror site because I am considering to make some more profound changes in those sites. It would make sense to do all of the work at the same time.

My thanks to Marcel for this great idea. So if you do not like it, all protests should be addressed to him but I am happy to receive any positive comments. Nah, of course I was kidding, all feedback is appriciated.

Edit: The rolls are now displayed in the Estonian blog(s).