Administrative

Blogroll

18 Comments

As you can see, I’m starting to rebuild (and update) my old blogroll over on the left. It’s going to be a long, painful process, though. Also, the link widget in WordPress seems to just alphabetize both links and link categories, so I can’t get it to present the links in the order desired (does anyone know if there’s a way around this?). If you have a space web site that I didn’t have on the old one, it might be a good time to post it in comments here, where I can collect them for eventual inclusion.

18 thoughts on “Blogroll”

  1. The blogroll is only on the home page, not the pages that show up when you click an RSS feed link (which is how I usually read the blog.)

    It’s not that important, but it did confuse me for a minute.

  2. Good point, Glenn.

    And, I usually read the blog from the RSS feed, and click through when I want to comment or read comments, but is seems that Rand changed his RSS publication settings.

    I grew accustomed to being able to read posts full-width without having to scroll up and down for anything other than really long posts. But now it seems that the RSS truncates after a certain number of characters, and no longer has links embedded, so I have to click through on almost every post now, which gets a little tedious if I fall behind and want to read 4 or 5 posts in a row.

  5. I’m not an RSS guru, but what I can tell you is that it happened some time yesterday afternoon, Central time. If you made any changes to the RSS settings yesterday, and still have the old ones around, that’s where I would start. Wish I could be of more help, as I abhor whiners without solutions, and that is basically what I am right now.

  6. Precise arrangement of calls is, unfortunately, theme specific. In case of Ani-nouto, currently running the White As Milk theme, both index.php and single.php include a call to get_sidebar(), which pulls sidebar.php. The blogroll is generated by get_links_list(), called by sidebar.php. This way all components have the same sidebar, and, therefore, blogroll. If Transterrestrial’s theme calls get_links_list() directly from index.php and single.php, then perhaps one of them is missing. Sorry that I cannot be more specific.

    I also wanted to arrange links by other criteria than name. But to the best of my knowledge it is only possible with a plugin. This seems to be a pattern for WP. For example, here’s how to set order for archives:
    http://ani-nouto.animeblogger.net/2008/01/08/wordpress-category-order/
    Drawbacks of infinite customization 🙂

  7. I’m just getting started with WordPress myself, but as I understand it there’s a different template for the home page and for the individual post pages. So you might have to put the blogroll list in two different places.

    On my site I have a Main Index Template (index.php) and Page Template (page.php) and anything I want on both pages I just cut and paste.

    And I don’t mean to self-promote here, but since you asked I did just recently start a space blog at 62milesup.com. If you’d like I can send you some more details via e-mail.

  9. They’re enabled, but I probably need to modify the template to include the URL for them.

    you might have to put the blogroll list in two different places.

    No, they’re in the header, which is displayed on every page.

  11. You put your blogroll in the header? Most themes out it in the sidebar.php page. No matter — if your adding links to your blogroll through the Links Manager tab in the admin screen they will show up wherever the get_links() template tag has been placed. That tag is what is The WordPress docs page on customizing your sidebar/wherever your blogroll is has a Links section on how to setup the way the blogroll is displayed. If it’s not showing up on individual post pages you may have a “single.php” page that is meant to be the individual post page (or something like that) that needs to have the tag added to it.

  12. You put your blogroll in the header? Most themes out it in the sidebar.php page.

    This theme includes the left sidebar as part of the header, out of the box. I haven’t seen any reason (yet) to change that.

  14. Rand-

    Another site I ran across in a quick Google search seemed to indicate that changing themes changed that person’s RSS publication settings and pared RSS feeds down to simple excerpts. I would imagine that this would have an effect on your blogroll as well.

    Did you change themes some time during the day on Tuesday?

    If so, the fix may be buried so deep in the theme code that changing to a different theme may be the only easy way out.

  15. I have the “My Category Order”, “My Link Order” and “My Page Order” plugins installed, which gives me a drag-and-drop interface to set my own non-alphabetical order.

  16. I think another way to get the blogroll in the order you want it, is to add a widget textbox or two to your sidebar and give it or them a title like ‘Links”. Then you could paste in the blogroll reverences with the link code in the order you choose.

    I have not tried this but I think it should work. Keeping one link per line with no blank lines between them could be a problem but then again, maybe not.

  17. “This theme includes the left sidebar as part of the header, out of the box. I haven’t seen any reason (yet) to change that.”

    Oh, I see. I’ve come across themes like that. Evil things that they are. Anyway, supposedly if you are loading up your blogroll via that get_links() tag you should be able to modify everything inside the () to make it display as you want — alphabetically, or broken into sections, or latest added, or whatever. I used a theme once that listed all my previous blogs in my blogroll in alphabetical order (that is, the ones I already had in my links list) but any new links I added got dropped to the bottom. I also tend to separate my themes via categories, and some themes show the category titles, some ignore them but still list your blogs in category order… only without titles so they don’t make any sense.

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