Tag: Website Watcher

bookmark_borderBye Bye Blogrolling

Posted on

Despite their frequent emails over the past week —with each successive email featuring more and more exclamation marks to make the point “only one day left!!!!”— I’ve dropped my blogrolling subscription. Why?

I’ll tell you why, I’m skint. No wait, that’s something else…

The reason is simply that I don’t need their services anymore. I don’t use them for this site, and I don’t use them for my own little personal “internet start page” either. Simple enough.

But it does leave me with a quandary, one which was of my own making and quite deliberately manufactured. You see, not every site showed up as being ‘updated’ in blogrolling lists, and as I tend to use the indicator as a starting point for my browsing*, so I need to find another way to see the most recently updated sites and I’m hoping that way will be either the site feeds (if offered), or software like Website Watcher.

Not sure how this one will pan out and I’ll let you over the coming weeks, but if I don’t visit YOUR site within the next fortnight then you have a clue as to why… either that or I just don’t like you…

* how do you choose what sites to visit first, always your favourites or by the ones which have updated, and if you can’t tell which is which, how do you choose?

bookmark_borderClarity

Posted on

I have four blogrolls, the one on the left, one for “Other Blogs”, one for PhotoBlogs and an “Auditioning” blogroll. I’ve come to rely on and be comfortable working with them. They are loaded into a custom home page every time I start my browser.

I can’t use bl.ogs as it only allows one “blogroll”.

I DO use Bloglines for a huge myriad of other “sources” but I actually enjoy visiting websites to see the scenery (FeedDemon and other news readers fall into the same category).

I can’t use WordPress as the “recently updated” feature doesn’t work in 1.5 and I can’t pull info from there into my browser start page without hosting THAT page on a website and.. ohh too much hassle (but an option if the feature starts working again!).

UPDATE: I realise that you can use WordPress but it requires the running of a schedule “cron” job on the server and so you don’t know, until that job is run, when a site has been updated. It may work as designed but it requires ME to have input to the process. Blogrolling doesn’t it just.. works..

I like the idea behind Website Watcher but don’t want to have ANOTHER program running, if it was web based I’d jump at it.

So I think I’ll take the easy way out and stump up for another year of blogrolling. I MAY remove it from this site though and have a generic “links” page (like wot I do at the moment) but we’ll see. As mike pointed out, MyBlogLog indicates that sites on my public blogroll do get clicked every day so it might get a stay of execution.

Thanks for the suggestions though. Much appreciated.