Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Rotating blogroll!!!

My wife listened to me bitching about how many good chess blogs there are, and how I'd like to have a 'rotating blogroll' that randomly selects 10 from a larger list for display. This way, a more tidy blogroll, and when I hit refresh it selects 10 more random blogs.

It took her a few minutes to write me up a javascript that you can find at her blog. Feel free to use it, modify it with your own blogroll. You can just cut and paste the code into your template right where you already have your blogroll. Now I'll be able to make a very long blogroll but only have ten selected randomly. Sweet. The chess blogosphere is becoming so big and unwieldy, this is helping me tame the madness...

I put it at the top of my sidebar. The Knights Errant etc are below it (though I am frankly starting to think that having the Knights as a separate category is not the best way to do things: we are all chess bloggers after all. What is the best way to maintain a list of the Knights (it does help to follow everyone's progress with the circles) without having this separation? Perhaps an collapsable list in the sidebar).

Please let me know if you modify it (some features I'm thinking about are to alphabetize the list, or to ensure that it sample without replacement each refresh, or to renew the list every 24 hours instead of with every browser refresh).

10 Comments:

Blogger likesforests said...

Nice work! Alphabetizing is easy. Refreshing every 24 hours--since you don't have your own web server--may be tricky. You could use cookies, but then the effect won't work for users like me who have their browser throw away cookies each time I close it. ;)

8/15/2007 08:53:00 PM  
Blogger Jeff said...

Married to a woman who can out script you. How sexy!

8/15/2007 09:32:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

the seperation between "knights errant" and "us regular chess bloggers" makes sense to me. we ARE all chess bloggers, but the knights have a specific purpose, the rest of us just write about chess...the rotating blogroll is pretty sweet...

8/15/2007 10:48:00 PM  
Blogger Loomis said...

Refreshing every 24 hours should be simple. Just seed your random number generator with the date.

Listing blogs by post recency and frequency would really be something.

8/15/2007 11:15:00 PM  
Blogger Blue Devil Knight said...

Good idea with the date Loomis.

Posting in descending order of recency of date is a great idea, but would likely slow down page loads a lot.

8/16/2007 12:39:00 AM  
Blogger likesforests said...

Ooh, nice thought Loomis. :)

8/16/2007 01:30:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm using WordPress :-)

8/16/2007 03:30:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And what's with the comment moderating? Someone spamming you?

8/16/2007 03:32:00 AM  
Blogger Blue Devil Knight said...

DD: Does wordpress have a rotating blogroll widget or something?

Comment moderation : its time had come.

8/16/2007 03:49:00 AM  
Blogger transformation said...

i only wish that i had a wife half as beautiful and smart as yours (or one of any kind!).

surely, if the BDK's had kids theyde be real 'whipper-snappers!'

8/18/2007 10:39:00 PM  

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