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Source. The mechanic is BlogRolling.com's, whose documentation is the only place it was ever specified: the homepage on 24 September 2002 and 7 June 2003, plus howto.phtml, docs_general.phtml and docs_css.phtml on 10 April 2003, all in reference/2-discovery/blogroll/. The three weblog dialects are three captured 2003 files in the same folder: dollarshort.org with its stylesheet of 11 April 2003, megnut.com with fall_megnut.css of 27 January 2003, and boingboing.net of 20 March 2003. Every color, width, font stack and line height was read out of those files: the 750 pixel column made of a 206 pixel sidebar and 531 of content, the 491 pixel box with a ten pixel top border, the #69A52D bands beside a 204 pixel rail at eleven on sixteen, and a table of one 75 percent cell beside one 25 percent cell with no stylesheet at all.

The three weblogs are recreations and the page never pretends otherwise. Their names, taglines and posts are written for this guide. Every href in them is an RFC 2606 .example domain, so nothing on this plate points at a real person's site and no real individual is named or impersonated. dollarshort's sidebar in the June 2003 capture holds only Archives, RSS Feed, Contact and Handheld version, with no blogroll in it, so it is used for the chrome and that nav line is kept for the same reason. megnut's real rail was position:absolute at left:470px; this one floats, because an absolute rail inside a page that grows a whole weblog every time you click will not hold.

The one real blogroll here is a specimen, and it is where the rot number comes from. boingboing.net on 20 March 2003 carries a hand typed roll in a 25 percent table cell: the heading BEST BLOGS in bare caps, twenty anchors, twenty one line breaks and not one list item. SOURCES.md does not mention it; it was found by reading the file. All twenty of its URLs were requested on 24 August 2026. One still serves the weblog it pointed at. Two serve a page saying the site moved, both on panix.com. Six answer with a domain sale lander or an unrelated business, one of them an Indonesian link page on a recycled domain. Eleven do not answer at all: six 404, one 410, one 500, one expired certificate, one wrong certificate and one connection timeout. Only the twenty titles are printed, as text and not as links, because nineteen of them no longer reach the weblog.

BlogRolling, verbatim. The pitch is off the 7 June 2003 homepage. The BlogrollThis bookmarklet is the exact javascript: URL out of docs_general.phtml, and the failure line is that page's own PHP example, error string included. The include pasted into the template is not a reconstruction: it is the script tag BlogRolling ran on its own homepage, with its own hash r=3fea918760556b77e843196ac865adb8. It was live in the 24 September 2002 capture under the line (*) recently updated, and in the 7 June 2003 capture the entire table cell holding it is commented out. Why is not knowable from the files, so the plate says what happened and not why. The artwork is theirs, recovered from the archive and served from this origin rather than hotlinked: sq_logo_dgr.gif at 140 by 113 and 1,954 bytes, text150.gif at 150 by 15 and 514 bytes, top_100.jpg at 78 by 24 and 937 bytes, every dimension and byte count measured off the file. Copyright 2001-2003 by Vapid Productions. All Rights Reserved. Reference and illustration only: this guide holds no license to it and prints none.

The ending is three captured rankings, parsed rather than described. blogrolling.com/top.phtml on 10 April 2003 is exactly one hundred list items with no numbers printed, under the line These are the top 100 links being displayed by BlogRolling users. Updated once every hour. truthlaidbear.com on 22 March 2003 is 280 ranked rows in sixteen named tiers, from Higher Beings to Insignificant Microbes, with Marauding misspelled in the source and quoted as found. daypop.com/blogrank on 22 March 2003 reports Total weblogs: 13060. Their three top tens fill thirty slots with twenty six distinct sites and share exactly one site across all three. Three of the seven names in BlogRolling's own documentation example blogroll turn up in BlogRolling's own Top 100 nine weeks later, at one, at ten, and the service author's own weblog at forty six. That is a computed coincidence, printed next to the contemporaneous hypothesis from kottke.org on 12 March 2003 that these lists disagree because each measures the network from its own seed, and it is not offered as proof of it. All four files are now in reference/2-discovery/blogroll/.

Checked live, 24 August 2026. rpc.blogrolling.com and blogrolling.com have no DNS record, so every roll still carrying that one script tag has been blank for years. Of the six 2003 rankings, four are gone and two answer. myelin.co.nz still carries a notice promising a next generation ecosystem running on a PC in a living room in New Zealand. blo.gs still publishes a most watched top twenty, every row carrying class="updated", and eight of those twenty now print a link farm's domain where the weblog's title used to be while another prints Story here. That page was saved into reference/ the same day, because it is live data and it will drift.

Deliberately absent. Any claim that Movable Type shipped a blogroll: it did not. MT's default template stylesheet, with its .blogbody, .sidetitle and .syndicate classes, could not be located in the archive, so the template editor on this plate is deliberately not dressed as the MT admin and borrows blogrolling.com's own flat 2003 chrome instead. The RSS and OPML output paths, which get one line about isRecent and no more. The RecipRoll wizard, multiple blogrolls, chunked display, and the random link. Any figure for how many sites ran a blogroll, when the practice ended, or what share of links rotted in general: the only rot number here is twenty links off one real roll, counted one at a time. And the outcomes behind the invented names in the recreated rolls are staged rather than measured, which is what a simulator does; the measured decay is the specimen.

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