Blogrolling No More

On my horribly dated “To-Do” list, I said that when my Blogrolling.com membership expired, I was going to implement something else. Blogrolling.com’s service works, but when the service went down, it made this site take a while to load (anytime you have to pull data from another server, things are going to slow down a bit).

My membership for blogrolling.com expires this April, and I wasn’t really wanting to spend another $20 on a service I really don’t use all that much (as you can see by some of my dated links on there, it’s been a while since I’ve updated things). The “something else” solution above hadn’t been updated for a long while and the site was full of errors, so I didn’t really feel like installing it, either.

Then Arvind, the studly MovableType guy that I’ve linked to here several times, decided to create MT-Blogroll. With a bit of work, I had it import my Blogrolling.com OPML files, I created an index template using the plugin’s tags, and now the right-side links on this site are now being powered by that plugin and that PHP-included index template. The site appears to be loading a split second faster now because external lookups don’t have to be made, and now my site won’t go down because of an inaccessible blogroll (if it can’t access the blogroll now, it’s because you can’t access the site). Thanks, Arvind!