Monday, April 7, 2008

New Blogger Feature: Blog List

You may notice a change on the sidebar at Destination: Austin Family - I've managed to automate the listing of my favorite genea-blogs by using Blogger's new Blog List widget.

I'll admit it is much easier using this widget than having to frequently update a list of blogs by hand. If you use Google Reader, which I do, it is even easier to locate your favorite blogs and add them to the Blog List.

Once you follow the instructions, these are the other benefits of adding Blog List to your Blogger site:

• the list of blogs is composed in HTML and not JavaScript - these means by adding your favorite blogs you are helping to improve the PageRank standing of those blogs within Google searches;

• you can display all the blogs in your Google Reader, or only 5, 10 or 25 blogs;•

• you can include the title of the most recent post or even a snippet of the item; and

• you can list the date of the last update to the blog.

If your genea-blog isn't already added to my reader and the blog list, then 1) please forgive me; and 2) send me an email or add a comment and let me know the name and website address and I'll be happy to add it!

This week is Spring Cleaning not only at home but on Destination: Austin Family. I'll be re-working the layout of items so look for changes by week's end!

5 comments:

Terry Thornton said...

Neat! THANKS. I can see major advantages of this setup --- I appreciate your tutorial.
TERRY

Jasia said...

Well now, isn't this a handy-dandy feature!?!

This could take care of that job I've been meaning to do but have been procrastinating on... updating my blog roll.

Thanks for the tip!

footnoteMaven said...

Spring, when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of "blog housekeeping?"

Thanks for using the poster. Who couldn't submit to you or the COG?

fM
footnoteMaven
Shades Of The Departed

Terry Thornton said...

Thomas, Thanks again for this suggestion. I've got it up and running at Hill Country --- and I added a search-this-blog function also. I do appreciate your suggesting the blog list from Blogger. It imported all of my Google Reader links --- and I added one to it that reader would never let me link. I'll give it a trial --- but so far, I've very pleased with how it looks and how it functions.
TERRY

Elizabeth O'Neal said...

Thanks for another great suggestion, Thomas! Any time you want to come on over here and clean, you're more than welcome!! :-)