Blogrolling Soon to Die
When I first started blogging in January of 2006, see my first article here, I came across the services of BlogRolling.com which provided a simple script to help manage my list of links, or blogroll as it is commonly called.
But nothing lasts forever in the blogosphere. For example, last October Yahoo shut down the free version of Geocities, a web hosting service, killing millions of pages of personal reflections, commentaries, scientific treatises, and esoteric data created over 15 years. At one time it was the third most visited domain in the world.
I understand that Yahoo failed to turn a profit with the service, but it should have archived the content instead of simply deleting it. I consider deleting web content the equivalent of book burning. Not a nice thing except perhaps in the case of the Qur'an.
But I digress.
Last Saturday the good folks running Blogrolling.com announced they will be shutting down the service:
We’re aware that there is an issue with BlogRolling blogrolls causing some browsers to display a security warning.
There’s nothing really wrong with BlogRolling itself but the way we connect your blog to the sites in your blogroll makes some security algorithms think there is.
If you find yourself in this situation, we recommend you remove the Blogrolling code from your site.
We’re probably going to be shutting the service down soon. We’ll post more information here and on our Twitter account (@blogrolling) as we decide on next steps.
We’re hoping we can give you enough time to get any data you need out of your blogrolling account before we shut down, but if you really need that data, you might want to get it now just in case.
Why aren’t we just fixing it and letting you continue using the service?
BlogRolling has largely been on auto-pilot for the last six months or so. The people who built it for us don’t work for us anymore. Even though it doesn’t make us any money, we wanted to keep it running because we know folks like it. But we’re not really comfortable with the code causing security warnings and that means it’s probably time for the service to end.
Thanks for your support. Stay tuned for more details in the next few days.
I made a copy of my blogrolls and what you see in my sidebar is now simple HTML code.
Many sites that have not looked over their blogrolls in years have removed the old Blogrolling code and are now rebuilding their blogrolls from scratch.
That nothing lasts forever gives me hope about Islam.
