yahew.com The blogroll

The blogroll

eleven names down the side of a page, typed by hand

JUNE 9 2003

Who I read

There is no setting for this. The names in the left column are typed into my template, one anchor and one line break each. To add you I open the template, type the tag, and rebuild the whole site. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the list is short.

Posted at 11:14 AM

Try one

Click a name. You land on somebody else's page, in their colors, and the first thing you get is their column, not their posts.

Posted at 11:14 AM

paper route
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June 7, 2003

Housekeeping

Rearranged the right column again. Everything I read is in it, and it is the only part of this page I edit by hand.

posted at 9:02 AM

You walked in through somebody's sidebar. Two of the names in mine were in theirs.

Daily Reads

(*) recently updated

paper route
the back of the envelope
A DIRECTORY OF SMALL THINGS

Linkage
Rail rebuilt. The heading is in caps because it always has been, and the names under it are anchors and line breaks, nothing else.

posted by the author at 4:41 PM | permalink 		BEST BLOGS

(*) recently updated

Every name below the heading is an anchor. Nothing on this page checks whether any of them still answer.

Edit Template: Main Index

This is the sidebar block, in the markup. Type an anchor into it, or delete one, then rebuild. There is no other way in.

Every name is now in your HTML, on your server, in your colors. Nobody has to be running for it to be there.

BlogRolling blogrolling.com
There are a lot of tools out there to help you blog without getting your hands dirty: but managing your linklist still means having to crawl through the HTML in your template every time you want to add or remove a link. No more!

blogrolling.com, 7 June 2003

The bookmarklet you dragged to your links bar, verbatim:

javascript:void(rollpop=window.open('http://www.blogrolling.com/add_links_pop.phtml?u='
  +escape(location.href)+'&t='+escape(document.title),'rollit',
  'scrollbars=no,width=475,height=350,left=75,top=175,status=yes,resizable=yes'));rollpop.focus();

Then you pasted the code where your names used to be. This is the include off BlogRolling's own homepage, their own hash:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php?r=3fea918760556b77e843196ac865adb8"></script>

Your sidebar: hand typed

Turn it off. If your names are in your template, nothing happens. If they are coming from the include, scroll up.

The JavaScript include failed silently. Only the PHP path ever said anything:

$url = "http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display_raw.php?r=424105fdb82581b3336f23ee111610b8";
if($my_blogroll = @fopen("$url", "r")){ ... }
else{ echo "ERROR: $url is currently inaccessible"; }

Checked 24 August 2026: rpc.blogrolling.com has no DNS record. Neither does blogrolling.com. Every roll still carrying that one line has been blank for years, on pages whose owners cannot fix it without editing a template they may no longer have.

Field marks

A rail of about 200 pixels, one size down from the body
206 on the sage weblog above, 204 on the green one, 170 in BlogRolling's own example stylesheet. Denser type than the posts, because it is a list.
A plain heading, never a count
Elsewhere. Daily Reads. Links. BEST BLOGS. No number beside it, no Following, no Followers, nothing counted anywhere.
Anchors separated by br, not list items
BlogRolling emitted line breaks, which is why every example stylesheet it shipped carries .blogrollmain br { display:none; } to force the run back into rows. Here is a real one, hand typed, in the right rail of boingboing.net on 20 March 2003: twenty anchors, twenty one line breaks, zero list items. BEST BLOGS Irregular OrbitWiley WigginsWeblogskyAtom GridElectroliteMaking LightScrubbles.netMooselessnessFollow Me HereJimwichKottke.orgBlatherThe Null DevicePigs & FishesFactovisionrandomWalksSubterranean NotesOddball Comic Book of the DayDue Diligencestevenberlinjohnson.com Titles only, as text. Requested live 24 August 2026: one of the twenty still serves the weblog it pointed at, two say it moved, six answer with a domain sale page or somebody else's business, eleven do not answer at all. See the capture.
Georgia at the front of the stack
Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif is what all three of BlogRolling's example stylesheets set, at 12 pixels. Georgia leading a sans stack is a 2003 fingerprint on its own, and this line is set in it.
A recently updated flag
BlogRolling restyled links using Weblogs.com ping data and its OPML carried isRecent="true", included only if blog is recently updated. On its own homepage the flag was three characters: (*) and the words recently updated. Every rail above uses it.
Top 100

That button sat in BlogRolling's navigation, between Recently Updated and Search BlogRolls. Its page carried one line: These are the top 100 links being displayed by BlogRolling users. Updated once every hour. One hundred rows, no counts printed, just an order.

By March 2003 there were six of these, and one weblog listed all six in one post because they disagreed:

Here are three of them, on their nearest captures, three weeks apart. Thirty slots, twenty six distinct sites, and exactly one site on all three:

Blogrolling.com Top Links
10 April 2003

  1. tampatantrum.com
  2. chris.pirillo.com
  3. asmallvictory.net
  4. instapundit.com
  5. boingboing.net
  6. dear_raed.blogspot.com
  7. davebarry.blogspot.com
  8. bigpinkcookie.com
  9. wilwheaton.net
  10. gretchen.pirillo.com

TTLB Ecosystem
22 March 2003

  1. instapundit.com
  2. atrios.blogspot.com
  3. denbeste.nu
  4. andrewsullivan.com
  5. dailykos.com
  6. talkingpointsmemo.com
  7. lileks.com
  8. littlegreenfootballs.com
  9. volokh.blogspot.com
  10. vodkapundit.com

Daypop Top Weblogs
22 March 2003

  1. scripting.com
  2. boingboing.net
  3. slashdot.org
  4. metafilter.com
  5. instapundit.com
  6. diveintomark.org
  7. kottke.org
  8. evhead.com
  9. drudgereport.com
  10. andrewsullivan.com

The middle one sorted 280 weblogs into sixteen named ranks, from Higher Beings down to Insignificant Microbes, misspelling Marauding on the way:

Higher Beings > Mortal Humans > Playful Primates > Large Mammals > Maurading Marsupials > Adorable Little Rodents > Flappy Birds > Slithering Reptiles > Crawly Amphibians > Flippery Fish > Slimy Molluscs > Lowly Insects > Crunchy Crustaceans > Wiggly Worms > Multicellular Microorganisms > Insignificant Microbes

Three of the seven names in BlogRolling's own documentation example blogroll turn up in BlogRolling's own Top 100 nine weeks later, at 1, at 10, and the author's own weblog at 46. The weblog that listed the six rankings had already written down why: the rich seem disproportionally richer because the network is being measured from their perspective. The moment your reading list became an input, it stopped being a list and became a vote. Nobody was asked.

Two of the six still answer. One has been promising a next generation ecosystem from a PC in a living room in New Zealand since 2003. The other still publishes its top twenty, every row still flagged recently updated, and eight of those twenty now print a link farm's domain where the weblog's title used to be. Checked 24 August 2026. Still up.

A blogroll is a run of anchors and line breaks. It is the cheapest thing in this entire guide to rebuild, it needs no service, no account and no host, and almost nobody has one.

Sources, and what is deliberately absent

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