Updating my WordPress Blogroll – Not as Easy as I Thought

Tags: Metablogging, WordPress, Blogroll, Plugins, Categories, Hacks, Tips, Links, Blog Template

Yes, here we go again with another change that I am working on at the moment for this particular weblog. One that, hopefully, you would be able to benefit from a bit as well. You may have noticed already, if you have visited the site, that at this point in time I do not have a blogroll in the left column of the weblog template and the reason for that is because I thought I would go ahead and update it first with my latest additions, taken from my RSS and Atom feeds, so I decided to start from scratch and reload the list again. It was also a good opportunity to do some housekeeping and get rid of the feeds that are broken or those where no new content has been shared in a long while.

However, this time around I decided to split up all of the different feeds into various categories, so that it is easier for me to track down the folks I read on a regular basis based on whatever the topics and then other categories with feeds that I just get to check every other day. So I have now got my RSS feed client with a good bunch of categories and their corresponding feeds split up quite nicely. At least, easier to read, manage and navigate for me.

Thus I was hoping to keep that same structure in my WordPress weblog while updating the blogroll, but to my surprise WordPress does not seem to take the updated feeds per category. It just dumps it all into a single massive list of links very difficult to navigate through and find your way. I thought though that seeing how the vast amount of WordPress plugins keeps growing further and further with some impressive hacks that there would be one that I could use to display my blogroll in my site based on the categorisation structure that I put together.

But, alas I have not been able to find such plugin. At least, not yet, which is a pity. So here is the challenge. I know I could go ahead and add that blogroll with the categories manually one by one (That is not too difficult, I must say), but somehow I am not really sure I would want to do that for the over 500 feeds (Out of the 700 I currently have) that I want to display in my blogroll. That would be too much time consuming and perhaps too much effort put into it.

I have been searching around for a while and have not been able to find anything that would be easy to apply and that would do the trick. So I am writing this weblog post over here to check if any of you, folks, have been facing the same thing for your WordPress weblog(s) and find out how you actually solved the problem. I would love to hear from you how you actually managed to display your blogroll in your weblog template using the same categorisation structure you may have from your RSS feed client, whatever it is. Thus any ideas? Anyone out there who may be able to help me out with a cool tip on customising the blogroll with the least effort possible and obtaining the end-result I just described? Feel free to comment over here if you have got any suggestions, or contact me offline, on how to get that blogroll updated. Your help will be greatly appreciated since I would then be able to share with you all some of the latest additions to my blogroll. Yes, indeed, there are some surprises. And very shortly I will explain why…