In case you haven’t noticed, this blog is a little bland. Fact is that since I committed to putting time and energy into this blog, I haven’t given much attention to a natural gesture of blogging: blogrolls and links. It’s an old aspect of the web to link to all the other sites that please you. It’s natural, really. It’s how networks are formed.

Today it’s increasingly important how those links are exchanged. Blogrolls were developed within software such as WordPress which runs this blog, to help maintain the link network, and divide it into categories of sorts.

Unfortunately I’ve never developed my blogroll just yet. A peek at my backend shows that I haven’t changed it from the default links that come packaged with WordPress, which lead you to prominent WordPress developers’ personal blogs and affiliates.

Of course as an artist I think it’s important to question all of these methods, as though they were a medium.

For starters, I get bogged down by the thought of having to maintain a blogroll. Having to click into a menu and a sub-menu and edit this and update that. Sometimes links expire or get moved and then I have to do more work. It’s a positive development in how it forms networks, but still creates more work than it returns, sometimes. Are there any alternatives?

My newsreader – I use RSSOwl – already acts like my personal blogroll. It delivers all the content from dozens of sites as its published. My newsreader is for me. My blogroll is for everybody else. I want to make transparent both arenas of content – I want people to see what I see. I want it to be dynamic, shared and immediate. I want it to be excessive, demanding, to be as organic as code can be with room to grow. Plenty of others in the field talk about the feeds that filter in and out of their readers; or use their posts like link-lists and blogrolls with content; there are services that can build blogrolls to embed in your site (such as this list for newsgrist). But all of this is still not-quite what I’m interested in, or what I’m trying to say – and eventually I’m looking to avoid yet another service, site, or software necessary to deliver said content, I don’t want to have to remember or rely on another name, password, menu, etc. I just want to publish-and-play.

I’ve found over time that chances are, on the nets, if you’re thinking about something, so is somebody else. I’ve done programming but I’m not inclined to it – I prefer to take pre-existing code, hack and mash it up until it does what I want and usually a few things that I don’t! The WordPress community has grown to such an extent that software (plugins) are being developed for it all the time.

Back to the content: how to make transparent my feeds while maintaining a blogroll? I’m in my 8th month of blogging and I need to engage further audiences, I need to expand the network. But I need to question the medium and understand how concept, code and the notion of access all work together. Transparency is key.

RSSOwl can export an OPML file (basically a list of sites); any artist who sets up a blog or publishes at wordpress.com or blogspot.com is then publishing feeds and thus can be integrated into OPML files; the OPML file can double as my blogroll; I have a thought, what are other artists doing with OPML files – unfortunately a search for “artist” & “OPML” turns up some not-so-pleasant results (but I digress); a search leads me to yabfog who has written a plugin that displays an OPML file – BRILLIANT, that’s it!; now I can rely solely on my newsreader to pump out feeds, drop that file onto my server and my WordPress blog automatically updates everything!! Additionally, it looks nice and is even more-interesting than I thought: you can scroll the feeds live, and it even displays the entire posts, images and all! The images break the site but I don’t really care about that – it’s not something I have nor want control over. More important is that everybody can now easily access and even subscribe to all my feeds through their own readers! So in the sidebar now you will see a list of available sites and feeds! Enjoy!

(When I started writing this post I had exactly 100 feeds in my reader. Not a lot by any means – I’m sure there are dorks out there who have five-fold that number on a slow day; by the time I finished compiling this post I had 106 in my reader. And all I need to do is upload one file! Finally!

And this can all be collected into my ‘for artists’ series of posts; I understand this post is still pretty unclear for the ordinary user, especially for most artists, but again the purpose of this blog is to build and expand over time, not to publish an entire survey at once – that’s the beauty of the web, yo! WOOT!)

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