Boring Site Note: Why My Blogroll Changes

I’ve got a big long list of links, or blogroll, running down the righthand side of my home page. At the moment, it’s displaying links to about 160 sites.

This blogroll isn’t static–it’s a real-time representation of my Bloglines account. That is, it shows exactly what sites and feeds I’m reading (minus the Private folder, which is all just client stuff anyway) at the moment. I do this mostly because it’s convenient–it spares me the hassle of maintaining a reading list and a blogroll separately. I used to do both, and the latter inevitably gets ignored.

As you might expect, the blogroll changes a lot. It used to be shorter, then ballooned up to around 220 sites, and now I’m trying to prune it back as much as possible.

People sometimes notice when I take their site off my blogroll. They email me to ask why. My explanation is almost always the same: my tastes and priorities change. Maybe I want to read more sites about subject x, maybe I’m less interested in a site’s subject matter, or maybe I just want a change.

Also, I regularly find new sites I want to read, and if I didn’t knock old sites off the list, my reading list of sites would be absurdly long, and occupy too much of my time.