Making blogroll links more useful

Title	Making blogroll links more useful
Weblog	Gurteen Knowledge Weblog
Posted Date	Sunday 25 August 2002 11:04 GDT
Posted By	David Gurteen
Categories	Weblogs
Technorati Tags	weblogs
del.icio.us Tags	weblogs

Felipe Fonseca, Brazil (Portuguese), last updated on Saturday 24 August 2002 07:59 GMT

Quite simply each entry in the blogroll is the name of the weblog, the title then includes the name of the blogger, his or her country of residence and if the weblog is not in English - its language. Finally it is followed by the date it was last updated.

A lot of blogrolls do something similar but I quite like the format I have adopted.

Two technical notes:

a) the link pop up title is created by putting a title tag in the link e.g.the HTML code for Felipe's link is:

<a title='Felipe Fonseca, Brazil (Portuguese), last updated on Saturday 24 August 2002 07:59 GMT' href = 'http://www.joelhasso.com.br/hipercortex' target=_blank>Hipercortex</a>

b) I am checking the date/time the weblog was last updated by running a LotusScript agent once an hour that takes a look at the weblog home page for each weblog in the blogroll and notes its size. If the size has changed by more the 100 bytes since the last run then it marks it as updated. Crude and only accurate to the hour but for most cases it works just fine. What I am thinking of doing next is to add a color code icon next to the link to indicate more directly and visually when it was last updated.

I wish there was a de facto standard for this.

The Gurteen Knowledge Search Engine is a customised Google search engine that searches over 800 KM related websites and weblogs.   Web gurteen.com