August 05, 2002
New Link Policy. (I'm trying to head off a bunch of angry e-mails, here, so feel free to skip this post if you don't care about such inside blogging minutiae.) I've always tried to keep my links list fairly brief, in order so that visitors wouldn't be overwhelmed and might actually click on a link or two. There's a few sites in the main blog that I've humped like a drunken dog in heat, but for the most part I've tried to just stick some good links over there and hope that a few people checked them out. I had hoped to limit my list to about 25 blogs.
Now, as any math major can tell you, when you have a set number of blogs in a list, whenever you add a new one it means that an old one needs to be removed. Sometimes a link would be removed for a while and then returned, other times not. What I wanted was to keep the list fresh and to avoid was one of those massive 100+ permalink lists that are now pretty much the norm. I'm on a few of those lists, and while I certainly appreciate every link I get, it's practically impossible to get any kind of traffic from them. I figured I'd rather try and get 20 blogs a few hits than 100 blogs none.
This seemed to work well until about a month ago when, for the first time, a bunch of those folks whose blogs I delisted e-mailed me, asking what was up. (Probably not coincidentally, this all started around the same time as N.Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem, a method of ranking blogs based on the number of sites linking to them.) Well, I usually felt pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, so I would just put the writer's blog back up, which twice led to a different blogger getting bumped and then e-mailing me. To make things easier I stopped removing links, just adding new ones. The list went from 25 to 30 to 35, then 40, to the point where there were links on my own list I was reading less than once a week.
Which brings us to now, and to the much-reduced list at left. I've created a permalink list of ten blogs, as well as some "frequently rotated" (ha ha) Rotisserie Links. What this means is that your blog link may be gone, but it may very well return soon. I'm sorry if this bugs anybody, but blogging ain't all sunshine and puppies.
Now, as any math major can tell you, when you have a set number of blogs in a list, whenever you add a new one it means that an old one needs to be removed. Sometimes a link would be removed for a while and then returned, other times not. What I wanted was to keep the list fresh and to avoid was one of those massive 100+ permalink lists that are now pretty much the norm. I'm on a few of those lists, and while I certainly appreciate every link I get, it's practically impossible to get any kind of traffic from them. I figured I'd rather try and get 20 blogs a few hits than 100 blogs none.
This seemed to work well until about a month ago when, for the first time, a bunch of those folks whose blogs I delisted e-mailed me, asking what was up. (Probably not coincidentally, this all started around the same time as N.Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem, a method of ranking blogs based on the number of sites linking to them.) Well, I usually felt pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, so I would just put the writer's blog back up, which twice led to a different blogger getting bumped and then e-mailing me. To make things easier I stopped removing links, just adding new ones. The list went from 25 to 30 to 35, then 40, to the point where there were links on my own list I was reading less than once a week.
Which brings us to now, and to the much-reduced list at left. I've created a permalink list of ten blogs, as well as some "frequently rotated" (ha ha) Rotisserie Links. What this means is that your blog link may be gone, but it may very well return soon. I'm sorry if this bugs anybody, but blogging ain't all sunshine and puppies.
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