Blogrolling Screwing up Blog?
March 5th, 2009No Joy
I couldn’t get this blog to load today, and I think Blogrolling is the culprit. I’m not positive, but something called “ytmg” held everything up. I know Blogrolling now has pop-up ads. Maybe that’s the connection.
It’s time to kiss Blogrolling goodbye. I never understood how they made money, and I appreciate the free service, but I’m not going to screw up my blog to help them compensate for years of giving away their product.
I really dread this. To create a WordPress blogroll, you have to enter one blog at a time. I better check and see if there is a plugin.
If you’re on my blogroll, don’t worry. I’ll try to bring you back. Not that my current traffic levels justify the effort.
More
I found out how to import Blogrolling data to a WordPress blog. Oddly enough, when I Googled, the answer (nearly) was on a post over at Moxie’s. Once you upgrade to WordPress 2.7-something, a menu named “Tools” will appear, and there will be an import tool for blogrolls in there. The comment at Moxie’s suggests 2.5 is the same, but I had a later version than that, and I couldn’t find the import deal. The “Tools” menu did not exist. There were import tools, but if there was one that worked with Blogrolling, I didn’t see it.
Once you have 2.7 (which I now do), it’s a very simple job 1. Go to Blogrolling. 2. Go to “Get Code.” 3. Select the OPML code, which is pretty far down the page. 4. Copy. 5. Enter this code (a URL) in the WordPress import tool form.
So I saved all my blogs, and for the first time in months, I can now edit them.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:52 AM
Blogrolling doesn’t seem to use pop-up advertising. It uses pop-through adverts that open in a frame at the top of the screen whenever you click through a link your roll. I hate it and I’ll be switching over to Blogspot’s internal blogroll implementation now that I know there is one.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:32 PM
Clearly my knowledge of pop-this and pop-that jargon needs upgrading.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:01 PM
We’ve just relaunched yesterday and had a ton of optimizations to do to ensure that everyone’s rolls loaded quickly. Blogrolling requires a ton of resources to operate, so its pretty important for us to recoup some of our costs, hence the new advertising model.
There is relief available though – you can turn off ads by upgrading your account. This will eliminate all advertising, and help us by putting $20 in our pockets to cover the costs of operating your blogrolls, etc.
We’re also very open to other models that might help us achieve the same objectives – would love to get your feedback if you have any specific ideas.
Thanks for your support so far. If there are any questions I can answer, please let me know.
/ross
March 5th, 2009 at 2:15 PM
“ytmg” is something to do with Youtube video embeds, and it is the scourge of my life currently. Foxfire hates it, especially Foxfire for Ubuntu, and if a site has more than one Youtube embed on it the page never seems to finish loading, and my entire computer slows down, the fan comes on, everything. Believe it or not my desktop with Vista handles this somewhat better.
March 5th, 2009 at 4:22 PM
I use Bloglines – it’s both an RSS aggregator and a blogroll manager. Free and simple to use.