About 3 years ago I was wondering here how could we get the RSS back to what it was. It was a rhetorical question, and I didn’t provide an answer back then.
This is a topic going around the fediverse, and the usual suggestions are:
- Have a personal website (or start a blog).
- If you use RSS on your website, make it prominent so people know that it is there.
- Have a blogroll, or a way to recommend the blogs you read.
The last point is important and, without thinking about it, I was neglecting it in this blog.
What is a blogroll exactly? According to the Wikipedia:
A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list).
It also had a social component of this blogger reads me and has my blog in their blogroll, I will add theirs to mine. Which was a way of building your small blogosphere or community of blogs by sharing links. I made a few friends like that, and I still keep in touch with some of them after over 20 years. All because at some point we all had a blog.
Although I still haven’t found how to integrate it in the blog itself –I blame the mobile phones support for this, but it is all my fault–, I have now my public blogroll. It also generates automatically when I post and update the blog by processing ~/.config/liferea/feedlist.opml, because liferea is still my feed reader, so it should be up to date and reflect exactly what is that I’m reading.
In my old blog that run from 2003 to 2021, it had blogroll up to late 2009 –according to the wayback machine–, with a section on the right column suggesting blogs to read. On 2010 I started learning Python and, as an exercise, I rewrote my old PHP blog engine –using Tornado and Redis, in pure NoSQL hype–. At that point, I dropped the blogroll, but I can’t remember the reason.
I have the vague recollection of most blogs I used to read being inactive. Checking that blogroll from 2009, most of these blogs are either gone or stopped posting many years ago. Which is fair, I closed my old blog after all. A good blogroll has to be alive and updated to be useful.
Anyway, the idea of this post is to say: hey, I have a blogroll! You should have one as well, like the other cool kids. I still have to decide how I integrate it with the blog, even if most people read this pages via a feed reader!