Blogging 101: Create a Blogroll – Blog-Rolling around with Others

Today’s Blogging 101 assignment is to create a Blogroll powered by the Links tab to help manage the sites you enjoy to read and visit frequently and the power reciprocal links to your blog.  After all, as I have said a few times since our course started up, it is amazing the similarities there are between us.  

Creating a Blogroll is the perfect way to highlight the Blogs you follow and the websites that you visit frequently.

A blogroll is a list of links to blogs that the blogger likes. A blogroll is usually included in the blog’s sidebar. Some bloggers divide their blogrolls into categories. For example, a blogger who writes about cars could divide his blogroll up into categories for links to other blogs he writes, other blogs about cars and other blogs he likes about unrelated topics. The blogroll can be set up based on each blogger’s personal preferences, and it can be updated at any time.

The question, where, oh where to fit a Blogroll?  Bottom is taken; sidebar — well as long as my Blogging 101 content survives — taken so the typical Blogroll Link widget will not help this time.  Hummm …. is there such a thing as a Links page built into my exiting Theme?

My Solution

After a little searching around the Plugins Library I stumbled across a plugin called of all things Link Library. With almost 500,000 installs, it seemed like a god candidate to help bring my link idea to fruition.

Link Library WordPress Plugin

The purpose of this plugin is to add the ability to output a list of link categories and a complete list of links with notes and descriptions.

Besides having an overwhelming number of features, including allowing people to submit links to be included, out of the box it did a great job at organizing and publishing the links I have under my Links tab.

My links library or Blog Roll can be found here.  Now to start playing around with the more advanced features.