I was going to write this as a comment on the aside I made last night<\/a>, however it seems to be a bit long winded for that (not to mention, the aside was supposed to be a bit of a quick rant! \ud83d\ude42 ).<\/p>\n The previous post, resulted in several good comments from salient<\/a>, heather and Mana<\/a> which are well worth reading. Following their responses, I felt there were a couple of points I wanted to clarify – mainly to make my position on the matter clear, rather than actually disagreeing with anything they have said.<\/p>\n First off, my rant which started this was more the result of frustration than anything else. The blogroll is excellent and it has allowed both Heather and myself to discover some excellent, well written and entertaining blogs we would have otherwise missed. When this blog first joined it, we got two excellent advantages from membership:<\/p>\n Over time, Technorati removed the first advantage and now it seems Blogrolling are in the process of removing the second advantage. Over the last few days, the blogroll widget we display in the sidebar has done nothing but direct traffic away from our blog to other blogs (according to Feedburner outgoing links stats) – as we have not shown up on anyone else’s pages we have had no inbound traffic.<\/p>\n In reality, for the last three days now the blogroll has really been nothing but a free linking service to other atheist blogs. While I don’t really have a problem with that, it is a touch annoying that there is no reciprocation and, more importantly, we have no say (here at WhyDontYou) over which atheist blogs get linked to. As it stands, we would be better off replacing the blogrolling blogroll with a static blogroll where we chose which blogs were listed (note: at the moment, we have both).<\/p>\n While I am not, at the moment, thinking of removing the blogroll from here (and I wouldn’t advocate others remove it either – it is a good thing!), I do hope that someone with the requisite technical knowledge can come up with a solution to the problems. There must be a sufficiently IT literate atheist out there (or are they all on the sites which seem to always be on the blogroll!)<\/p>\n As further clarification, in my previous aside I was being very subjective when I complained that the good blogs seem to be missed out by the blogroll. I was, in an angry and frustrated manner, trying to complain that (often) if you visit all 25 blogs from the blogroll which should have “new” posts (i.e. are marked **New), you often find little more than a YouTube clip with no commentary or even no new posts. Yes, there are some brilliant blogs on the blogroll which I make the effort to visit as often as I remember, but there are a few that are barely readable.<\/p>\n In a nutshell (sorry for being longwinded about this!), the biggest thing which annoys me is the erratic nature of it all. For example, Pharyngula (an excellent blog) seems to be permanently on the blogroll (*) – which is understandable as he makes ten posts for every one a mere mortal can generate. However, WhyDontYou hasn’t been seen on it for the last three days, despite us having half a dozen new posts. I am sure there is no specific discrimination against this particular blog, I just wish I could work out how to solve it…<\/p>\n\n