I realised the other day that I’d been neglecting my blogroll. A bunch of out-of-date links were rubbing shoulders with those that I visit regularly — others that I frequent were absent.
Adding and removing links from your blogroll by hand is a waste of time if you already have a ready-to-roll data source available — the blogs you’re subscribed to through Google Reader.
The following steps explain how to create a blogroll on your WordPress blog (or Blogger account), that will automatically synchronise with the blogs you’re following in Google Reader. Provided you’re happy to publicly list your Google Reader subscriptions (or, at least, a subset of them), this trick will save you a lot of hassle.
Note that the instructions that follow assume you’re using a self-hosted WordPress blog, or have a hosted Blogger account.
Grabbing code from Google Reader
- Open Google Reader, and log in to your account.
- Select Options > Reader settings, and then the Folders and Tags tab.
Any folders you’ve already set up to hold your blog subscriptions are listed.
If you aren’t already using folders in Google Reader, you’ll need to create at least one folder to hold the subscriptions that you want to link to your blogroll.
- Select the check box next to the folder you want to use as a blogroll, then click the Change sharing drop down, and select public.
A number of links will now be displayed to the right of the folder details.
- Click add a blogroll to your site.
A new window opens — the right-hand side shows a preview of how your blogroll may look when incorporated into your blog.
- Change the Title of the blogroll if required.
- Select a Color scheme from the drop down list.
A preview of the scheme you’ve chosen is shown to the right.
For maximum visual control, select None instead of a specific colour. You can then style the blogroll separately within your blog.
- If you want to add the blogroll to a Blogger account, click the Add to Blogger button, and follow the instructions.
If you are using a self-hosted WordPress blog, continue with the instructions below.
- Select the HTML snippet shown in the text box, and copy it to the clipboard (CTRL+C to copy).
- Log in to your self-hosted WordPress blog, and open the Dashboard.
- Select Widgets from the Appearance menu.
- Find the Text widget in the Available Widgets list, and drag it into the Sidebar list on the right.
- In the Text window that opens, paste the code that you copied from Google Reader into the large text box (CTRL+V to paste).
You can leave the Title field blank if you already specified a title for the blogroll code in Google Reader.
- Click Save, then Close.
Adding the code to your self-hosted WordPress blog
That’s it! Your blogroll will now be automatically synchronised to the subscriptions in the folder you selected from Google Reader. As you add and remove subscriptions from the folder in Google Reader, these changes will appear immediately on your blogroll!
Of course, if you use multiple folders in Google Reader to organise your subscriptions, you can create a separate auto-synchronising blogroll from each folder.
If you have some subscriptions that you don’t want to be shown on a blogroll, just keep them in a private folder (or don’t put these subscriptions in a folder at all).
Your idea is just a piece of genius, although I’ve got one problem.
When I’m making a script in Google Reader I see only 5 top links, with a bottom link ‘see more‘ (“Wyświetl wszystko” in Polish).
What should I do to get a full list of links instead of 5 links + ‘see more’?
Asceta
Posted by asceta | October 11, 2010, 19:03Hi Asceta,
Are you definitely choosing “add a blogroll to your site” from the “Folders & Tags” tab when you’re setting this up? If you’re choosing “add a clip to your site” instead, this will include a (variable) limit on the number of posts that are shown.
I’ve just checked my code again, and with the “add a blogroll to your site” option, all posts are shown.
Hope that helps,
Paul.
Posted by Paul Filby | October 12, 2010, 11:57Thanks for your support.
I followed your instructions to add a dynamic blogroll to my blog. I copied the code and pasted into the Text widget in my wordpress, but every time I save it, it just disappears and in the blog only remains the title, with nothing else.
I would also like to know if the blogroll can have the first paragraph of the last post besides the title of the blog.
Thanks
Posted by Robert | February 2, 2011, 20:42Thank you for your comment Robert. I’m sorry this doesn’t appear to be working for you. I should have some time soon to take a look at this, and see if I can work out what the problem is. I’ll comment again then
Posted by Paul Filby | February 4, 2011, 00:16Hey cool, just did it and wondered if you know how to force the links to open in a new tab or window, they currently open in the same window.
Great post!
Posted by Matt | February 14, 2011, 03:47very helpful!
Using this now for my blogroll!
Posted by The Nerdy Nurse | February 17, 2011, 01:21Thanks @NerdyNurse — glad it was useful for you!
Posted by Paul Filby | February 17, 2011, 01:24Hi Matt, and thanks for your question.
As we’re limited to working with the code that Google Reader sends back, this has to be done using CSS. There’s a “target-new” property in CSS3 that’ll do what you want.
You need to create a new rule (for example, “{target-new: window}”, or “target-new: tab”), and apply it to the appropriate selector. You’ll need to add this rule to your theme’s style sheet (or, better, to the child theme’s stylesheet — then this change won’t get lost when you upgrade your theme).
I don’t have time just now to experiment and confirm the exact line of CSS you need to add, but I’ll take a look and comment with more detail when I can.
Posted by Paul Filby | February 17, 2011, 01:36Hi,
Great tool. Just one quick question; I have seen other sites using this and the bl;ogroll displays recent posts from their selected blogs. Mine is only showing the blog title. Am i doing something wrong?
Cheers,
Rich
Posted by Richard Openshaw | May 30, 2011, 22:43