I'm trying a different response to the Great Blogroll Controversy. My complete blogroll has been moved off to a separate page. It's been expanded greatly by adding the text of the rss/xml/atom description tag to it, so now there's some summary attached to each link. I don't create the description text; if you've got a weblog with syndication, you define it.

Of course, now the whole thing is just too huge to pack into the sidebar. Instead, I've whipped up a little code to extract a random dozen out of the whole list and display them over there to the right. The random set changes every 10 or 20 minutes.

The bad news: this does mean getting mentioned on my blogroll doesn't count for much as a data point on those weblog aggregating services like the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem or Technorati (actually, since I've also opted out of the TTLB, I don't count there at all anyway). Sorry 'bout that.

The good news: it does mean the web page is even smaller and tighter and faster to load. I also think it'll benefit the function of the blogroll in making it a place to spot new weblogs: the extra text has the potential to make the listings a bit more informative, and although they will show up less often and randomly, at least they won't be buried in that smear of links anymore. Face it, you guys never looked much at that, anyway…but if the whim strikes you now, just click on the Complete Blogroll link to see it.

I'm also thinking of adding a rotating set of manually updated links—a "Weblogs of the Week" block, where I'd just have a small number of static links that are kept up for a week, no more. I might get around to that in the next day or two right now.

It was easy enough, so I just plugged it in. Every Sunday I'll switch around the links in the "Weblogs of the Week" box to the right to something different from the blogroll. This is not to be regarded as an honor or something to be lobbied for; there are no criteria, no predictable ways to get on it, and links will be picked solely by me and solely on whim. It might be because I've just added a site to the blogroll; because something that day struck my fancy; because I went eeny-meeny-miney-moe; because the ravens spelled out the name of the blog on the street in the entrails of a dead squirrel. I will aspire to maintain the enigmatic mysterious ineffableness of it all.

The only thing I will guarantee is that I won't put a weblog on it because they get 50,000 hits/day.