How often you click on the archives on the sidebar of a blog? How often do you follow links in a blogroll that you didn’t knew already? In my site, according to my statistics, almost no one does it.
No wonder, of course. Who would be reading a hopefully interesting post check the sidebar and thinks:
Mhmmm…. February 2007, that seems interesting!
The same goes for blogrolls. Sometimes the title of a blog/site doesn’t make any clear what the content is. Sometimes is the name of the author, sometimes is a fictitious name like Zo’C and sometimes is just not enough.
I realized that my sidebar was too long and cluttered, and at the same time blogroll and archive were more or less useless, so I decided to turn them into pages.
You are able now to see another menu, on the top right of the reading area of the blog, with the new features.
The Archive Page is designed so all post titles are show along with the dates, like a table of contents. If one wants to overview the whole site this is a handy tool.
The Blogroll Page is even more interesting. I added a brief description of each site and links to it and the feed, when available, so you can have an idea of why I read that, and, more important, why you might like to read it as well. The descriptions are (mostly) taken or adapted from titles and about pages in each site.
With this kind of organization, now the blogroll can grow without imposing penalties to the sidebar. By the way, minor adjustments were made on the sidebar. If you are a frequent reader of Zo’C, you might have noticed a few things in different places.
[Update: Download the Zo'C Powerblogroll plugin to create powerful blogrolls like this]
[Thanks Jen and Michael for the discussion on the Authority Blogger Forum, and thanks Easton for the specific feedback]
8 Comments
I love your blogroll! Do you need to do that manually, or is there a plugin that makes it easier to add/remove/manage the blogroll?
@pelf –
Thanks!
Neither! It is a page with a tailor made template that retrieves the info from the wordpress native blogroll.
You might have noticed that the WP native blogroll have spaces for feed, description, notes, favicon, etc. I just did a customized layout that takes advantage of them all. The hardest part was to fill all that info that (as most users) I kept empty.
I never click on the blogroll or archives either typically. Nice to see Search-This in there :D
I also have a seperate blogroll page in my personal blog: http://www.ilovecode.com/sites-i-like/
@ses5909 –
I know, it is hard to be motivated to click on a date or a just blog name. That is why I decided to use all the fields on the blogroll object and show notes and all, I think is a better service for the readers.
I saw you blogroll page today, very nice (although it’s a pitty Zo’C isn’t there yet :-).
As soon as the code for the template leaves the beta stage I’ll publish it, so more people can use it.
Er, at the risk of sounding ignorant, does this plugin also have the option of creating a page seperately for blogrolls, or will this have to be done manually? And how?
Also, if you want another entry for that nice blogroll of yours, feel free to reply via e-mail.
Thanks,
Herbert
Guilherme, these are some great ideas. As I build up my archives, I plan to add introductory text at the top of each category page.
I think it’ll be useful for highlighting specific content for that category, but also as a way to introduce people to what they’re going to find there.
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