Rant

I've been blogging longer than most of you. Many of you don't even remember that there used to be an "old" Blogger. This site is based on "old" Blogger. Which is why there's no way to show my followers in the sidebar.

Anyhoo...In the old days, one picked up this javascript and that javascript to help manage your blog in better ways. One of those things I added was from Bloggrolling.com. They would manage your favorite links, and organize them in a variety of ways that you could tell them to. And you could add a link with the click of a button, and it would be automatically added to your blogroll. Based on the criteria that you defined for it. In my case, that would simply be alphabetical.

Some of you mentioned that you had received warnings when trying to get to my site on Thursday. I noticed on my own that my blogrolls had disappeared. Checking their support site, I'm informed that Blogrolling has pretty much been on auto-pilot for the past 6 months or more. And that none of the programmers who set it up are associated with Blogrolling anymore. Their suggestion? Delete the Blogrolling code. That's it. No suggestions on how to transfer the info or save it. Just a slam, bam, thank you ma'am. And that it's all going to be shut down in the near future.

So what does this mean? A loss of the history of HNT, for one thing. There's well over 300 links over there. Many of them are former HNTers, but at least there's a link to some of the old-timers. The blogroll has actually been cut down from over 900 which were there a year ago. I hated doing that. I actually check many of those links from time to time. And am often rewarded by a post from someone who forgot they even had a blog. It's nice to reconnect at those times. But now, I'm going to lose those. I also have that second blogroll of non-HNTers. Ones that many of you have never heard of. At least with HNTers, I can use YOUR blogrolls to visit. These, are soon to be lost to me.

So it seems I have one of two options. Get into my account, and manually copy/paste every link I've got, and save them somewhere until I figure out what to do. Or I can suck it up, switch to the "new" Blogger, and start adding my favorites. By hand. And doing that everytime I see someone new. Because my blogroll isn't so much a 'favorites' thing, as it is a roster. Is everyone on it? Of course not. Not because I don't like someone, but because I just never got around to adding them.

This little rant has gone on too long, so I'll extract it and make a separate post for it. First my Haloscan left, and now Blogrolling. I suppose change is inevitable, but it would be nice if someone reliable could take up the slack...