I try to steer clear of meta-blog posts, and doing two in a week is definitely not usual for me, but given that Fiat Lux has recently been added to a few more blogrolls around the Internet, I though it might be a good idea to explain a little bit about my own blogroll and how one gets into it.
My Blogroll / Link Policy
I use Bloglines as my primary RSS feed aggregator. What I’ve been trying recently is this: I’ve self-imposed a limit on the number of blogs in my blogroll as a way of keeping my blog-reading habit under control. Any time I add a new blog to my Bloglines list, I force myself to remove an old one.
Bloglines also happens to have a neat little feature that lets me paste a bit of JavaScript into a template and my current list gets automagically updated on my website. It’s less work for me that way, but it does have the drawback that I can’t easily do “courtesy” blogroll additions unless I break my self-imposed rule above, get funky with my Bloglines setup and/or manually maintain that list.
The exception to this plan is the list of personal weblogs written by people that I know in real life. I keep their blogs in a private folder on Bloglines and manually maintain a selected list of those here on my weblog.
In short, if you want to get into my blogroll, you have to be better / smarter / funnier / more interesting than somebody on the current list, or you have to be a friend or family member. I do read blogs that are not on my blogroll, generally by clicking through other people’s links and blogrolls, but that’s reserved for days when I have more time on my hands.
So that’s how my blogroll works. If I come up with a better way of managing things, I’ll switch to it; ultimately this is about keeping things easy, informative and fun for me. Incidentally, that’s also why I do not use Technorati tags. Writing posts is fun; messing around with tags isn’t.
And while I’m at it, here’s two other meta-blogging bits and pieces:
Comment Policy
I have a very simple comments policy. I reserve the right to remove any comment left on this site, for any reason or for no reason at all. I pay for the web hosting; I get to decide how my disk space and bandwidth are used. However, I do not edit comments; that seems unfair. If they do not get tossed into the bit bucket, they remain as their authors wrote them.
Advertising
At one point I had a tip jar up here; it’s not anymore. I decided that this site is a hobby, and I’m not going to ask people to subsidize my fun. If my traffic were to rise to the point where I had to pay significantly more for hosting, I might reconsider and put up some ads, but for now, this site stays ad and tip jar free.