Rodent Regatta

I know enough to be very dangerous when it comes to using HTML, building web sites and editing a weblog. When it comes to these matters, I can contribute a user’s or layman’s point of view, but I can’t write – with any authority – about the technical aspects of accomplishing what I suggest.

Here’s my premise: there is a relationship between what many people want to do with their blogrolls and their RSS subscriptions. Why do I manage these two areas of my weblog experience independently of one another?

Some definitions are in order. The blogroll is a list of links somewhere on a weblog that points the author and/or the readers to other weblogs or web sites. It can be maintained by using a service like blogrolling.com. Or it can be maintained by directly editing a list of links in the templates of the weblog.

The RSS feeds are ”behind-the-scenes” pages of XML code that allow one to subscribe to the work of another and see that work in one of the many RSS readers. In other words, weblogs with RSS feeds can be aggregated with other weblogs for reading in an RSS reader. Basically, you build a personalized newspaper made up of all the weblogs and web sites you subscribe to. Learn more about RSS here.

Each morning when you open your news aggregator or RSS reader (SharpReader is the one I’ve worked with most recently), you’re presented with the news. As a weblog writer you hope the RSS reader’s presentation facilitates copying, pasting, annotating and providing attribution and links to whatever catches your eye. If Dave says something that I want to repeat or comment on, I may want to quote a portion of what he says, link to the rest and attribute the entry to him. [See a great example of this sort of posting here.]

Assume it’s the first time I’ve read that weblog, but I like it and want to include it in my blogroll. Using blogrolling.com I can open a window with one-click that allows me to add that weblog to my list. If I have my weblogs grouped by subject into HTML-related weblogs and photography-related weblogs, that same window permits me to ”drop” the link into the proper group.

The more I work with my own weblog, the more convinced I become that I’m often maintaining two things for the same discovery. If I find a new site that I like, I’ve got to consciously maintain my RSS subscriptions and my blogroll ”subscriptions” independently of one another. There’s a relationship in many cases and I want to be able to update both needs with one round of subscribing.

I should be able to group my RSS subscriptions differently from my blogroll. I may think of my RSS subscriptions by subject or by frequency of reading. I may do just the opposite with my blogrolls. The daily reads in my blogroll may cross many subjects, but in my RSS reader, I may want to go through the socio-political weblogs before I go through the HTML-related ones.

There’s a relationship between maintaining subscriptions to blogrolls and RSS feeds. Will the weblog tools change to accomodate this? Will blogrolling.com change? Will the feed readers add blogrolling? I’m not sure, but let’s get this stuff together – somehow!