on blogrolls

With post #500 looming I have found myself taking stock of the whole blogging thing. Yesterday I finally followed through with a decision I had a really hard time making: tossing the blogroll. I love blogrolls; it's how I found good blogs when I started and it's how readers have found mine. They are invaluable resources. But the fluid nature of blogging means that I was constantly updating it ~ or so it seemed. That was fine when I was keeping track of 20 blogs but as the numbers increased, so did my apathy. I allowed my blogroll to become so out-of-date that I was procrastinating, and the neurotic in me was getting stressed over the whole thing. I know there are people who choose not to blogroll and I never had anything against them, but I liked to think I was a 'caring, sharing' kind of blogger.

The truth is, I often allow my life to get out of control with over-commitment. Over the years I have learned to stop, analyse and remove the non-essentials before I overload. From a practical point-of-view I wasn't even using my blogroll. I find Bloglines to be a much more efficient way to keep track of the (too many) blogs I like to read. See, that was another problem; I was trying to keep both Bloglines and my blogroll updated and Bloglines was winning. So yesterday I took the leap and hoped nobody would notice. Almost immediately my favourite idler-from-down-under did! Busted!

Anyway, in the finest spirit of "don't try this at home, kids" I hope that nobody thinks I'm on to something and deletes their blogroll after reading this, especially if I'm on it! :)