The last few weeks over at The Progressive Blogger Alliance have been filled with people asking to be put on the Blogroll. The Blogroll - actually one of the first efforts that the PBA grew from, before the network even used a central node based on Drupal software - was discontinued a while back. A mixture of administrative trouble, technical glitches and a rumor that the Google bot may interpret Blogrolls as link farms (and punish the sites' rankings).

The last one I don't know about. If it is true, it might be best to leave it be. But the other two are fairly easily solved.

One problem with the present PBA blogroll is that it uses an external service, Blogrolling.com, whose free accounts are limited and which is not easy to administrate. It is for all purposes impossible to administrate in a group (with shared access and multiple permission levels), which is the philosophy the PBA and Drupal works on.

The solution is obvious: A Drupal module for a blogroll. The links will be fed to it by members - perhaps this could even be meshed with a custom profile field or the Homepage profile field - and the output page will be a Javascript application that prints the links.

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Some extra convenient settings for fine-tuning this blogroll (multiple links, RSS feeds, blocking certain links from certain sites, subgroups that only link amongst themselves to keep the length down, etc) could be added as well.

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Following this rough pipedream of a spec, the next step, naturally, is to see if this has been made before. If it hasn't, well... let's get going! ^_^