pba

I'm in the process of updating the blogroll of the Progressive Blogger Alliance, which begins with checking the status of each site and grouping them into categories like "active", "dead", "moved" etc. Thanks to the magic of PHP, this post will show my exact progress with this, as I am entering the status of each site in a neat MySQL table. Here's the breakdown: The total number of blogs is 227. This is the breakdown over status:

Status	Sites
	159
active	23
unreciprocating	11
gone	10
moved	7
dead	6
slow	6
temp_gone	4
titlechange	1

[break] And this is the list of sites, ordered by status:

Status	Site
pending check	OneWomanWreckingCrew
pending check	Mad Kane
pending check	Lucky White Girl
pending check	LOSLI
pending check	Logical Voice
pending check	Life in the Third Layer
pending check	anonyMoses
pending check	Another Liberal Blog
pending check	Anti-Zionist Notes
pending check	anti-[everything]
pending check	Antitheton
pending check	Apostate Windbag
pending check	Arancaytar's Little Corner
pending check	Arran's Alley
pending check	at ease
pending check	Atavistic Endeavor
pending check	Bait and Switch President
pending check	Banality Fair
pending check	Madison County Young Democrats
pending check	Maitri's VatulBlog
pending check	Majikthise
pending check	Ohio Liberal
pending check	Off-The-Record, Off-The-Wall
pending check	Odessa Street
pending check	Now Then
pending check	No Religion Now
pending check	NJ Spoken Word
pending check	Nick Lewis
pending check	NewsHog
pending check	Never Knew I was living in the

In summary, Drupal rocks.

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! ^_^