Send out some link love with Blogrolling
The fourth tool in our arsenal is Blogrolling, the link manager and sidebar organizer. Here is a great description:
“BlogRolling is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal, helping you manage your ever-evolving linklist with ease.”
Getting Started
To sign up, enter your email address, activate your account and create a new blogroll. That’s it. Creating a blogroll consists of naming the roll and adding the site address where it will be available.
At this point you can begin to add new links. Other options include customizing the look of the list, the order, the size of the links and more. You can also import a current list of links from a directory or aggregator by importing an opml feed.
Adding a link is easy - you only need to enter the title, url and a description. You can choose an alternate target, say opening the link in a new browser window, and choose a priority for this link (1 being the highest to 99).
Adding Blogroll To Your Site
I’ll assume that your site has a theme with a sidebar but this isn’t a necessity. From Mission Control, click Get Code and select the javascript which is shown below and place this in your sidebar wherever you would like the links to appear. You can change the look of the list using CSS if you’d like but not neccasary.
You’re done and now can add your favorites to your site. There is also a RecipRoll which shows people linking to your site - the code is added to your site in a similar fashion.
Is There More?
Other niceties available include an upgraded version called BlogRolling Gold which allows for multiple BlogRolls, more link customizing options and private BlogRolls.
There is also a bookmarklet for your browser which allows for quick entry into your BlogRoll; this feature is probably what made adoption of this tool so viral. And to get more people to link to you, offer up the BlogRoll Me bookmarklet which will add your site to their BlogRoll.
Some people will detract from this tool in that the links created by this tool are not hardlinks and don’t pass on Google PageRank. But for the ease of adding someone to your site without logging in to your blog software’s admin panel, Id think many would live with this minor criticism.
Technorati Tags: blogroll, linklove, bloghacking, css, opml, blogrolling, links
