blogroll tech update

blo.gs: sharing your favorites

So I'm almost all the way away from using Radio as a news aggregator. I still like using Radio for big news sites like The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, Salon, and The Washington Post. But as far as following "normal" weblogs I totally dig blo.gs. They let you login and set up a "watch list" and then give you a customized sidebar for either moz/Netscape 6 or IE5+. This way I get to see what sites updated and when, then I can go read them.

I was talking to Mark about news aggregators and he mentioned that he liked going to the sites to see what had changed besides the content. The more I use blo.gs the more I see what he was talking about.

A good example is The Flangy News. Adam started putting in some new pictures to mix up his design. I would have missed it if I only read his site through a news aggregator. Okay, that's not entirely true since he did eventually post about what he was doing. It's not a big thing, but the small things make life better.

blo.gs also lets you make your "watch list" public, which allows me to have the dynamic blogroll using this cool php script.

The blogroll is ordered by update time. The entries at the top have been more recently updated compared to the ones near the bottom. Another bonus is that when I add a weblog to my "watch list" through the blo.gs interface it gets updated in my sidebar and the blogroll on my site all at the same time. Very cool.