A Wild Vista

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 A bunch of out-of-date links were rubbing shoulders with those that I visit regularly — others that I frequent were absent.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

1. Open Google Reader, and log in to your account.
2. Select Settings > 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Change the Title of the blogroll if required.
6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Select the HTML snippet shown in the text box, and copy it to the clipboard (CTRL+C to copy).

Adding the code to your self-hosted WordPress blog

9. Log in to your self-hosted WordPress blog, and open the Dashboard.
10. Select Widgets from the Appearance menu.
11. Find the Text widget in the Available Widgets list, and drag it into the Sidebar list on the right.
12. 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.

13. Click Save, then Close.

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. This is exactly what I’ve done here on WildVista, with separate blogrolls for each of the main subjects featured.

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).

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• How to Add Your Google Reader Feeds as a Blogroll on Your Site (anneonlife.com)