Building the Blogrolls

A reader inquired recently about the criteria that I use to select (or not select) blogs for inclusion in our MBS blogrolls. This post is based upon my response.

I grapple with this question often. The blog lists I curate contain links to sites about consensual adult spankings. I strive to select sites that will be of interest to my readers. I've discussed my standards from time to time here on the blog - no non-consent, no children, no mutilation, no exploitation, no denigration, no abuse, no spam, no hate, no blood, no scat, and so forth.

These lines seem clear enough until we dive into actual blogs. I look for blogs that are primarily about spanking, but they need not be exclusively so. I am not offended by a few photos with nudity or sex as long as they otherwise comply with the standards above. But what if there are as many sex photos as spanking photos? And what if a few of these photos are extreme? Do I link or should I withhold the link? I have done both in various situations. I have dropped a link because of one picture or sentence. I have also judged a blog's content to be so strong overall that I chose to overlook a few questionable elements.

To make the task more challenging, all 993 linked sites are moving targets. A blog that looked fine when I reviewed it can quickly swerve into a whole different genre. It could be porn or torture or furries or even entirely vanilla! Until I wander back there or someone tells me, the link persists. It's tough enough to find and trim all of the stale and dead blogs, let alone those that have gone bizarre.

So what's the solution you may ask. I do the best I can to present appealing options for your browsing enjoyment. Not everything appeals to everyone. That is a given. At the same time, I genuinely seek to avoid freaking out or grossing out my loyal readers. In the end, I must decide which blogs deserve a link. I hope I'm fair and apply my criteria in a reasonably consistent manner.

Should you encounter a site in my blogroll that you believe is objectionable and inconsistent with the tone of MBS, I invite you to write me. Chances are, if it's worth mentioning, I probably won't like it either. And if there is a spanking-related blog that should be linked and isn't, I always want to hear about those!

Better, Not Perfect

A while back, I described the problems I was having with blogrolls in Blogger. The short version is that I could no longer update the main blogroll. Nor could I replace it. I made do as best I could, but it was not a good situation. I know many MBS readers rely upon the chronological blogroll to stay up to date. That's why I've been so eager for a fix these past three months.

This week, along comes Blogger and they decide to take a whack at fixing several of these blogroll problems. They seem to have repaired several nasty bugs, but left one in so we can all feel nostalgic. Before January, there was no limit to the number of links permitted in a blogroll. With the coming of the new white interface, a limit of about 160 was imposed without warning. I think it was a bug. This week, the limit was apparently raised to about 295. I still think this is a bug.

So, here we are, with better tools than last week but not as good as last year. My solution, at least for now, is to split the chronological blogroll into two parts (A-M and N-Z). It's not great, but it's better.

Update: With timely advice from Hermione, I was able to create one complete, unified blogroll. I was absolutely delighted right up until I accidentally deleted it all! Now I have to manually enter 488 links again. Ugh!

Update #2: Everything is now as it should be at long last! Thanks to everyone who offered technical advice and moral support. Believe me, I needed it!

In a bizarre footnote to today's festivities, after I had spent hours re-entering nearly five hundred links into a new blogroll, the one I thought I had deleted mysteriously reappeared. Suddenly, I had two of them, nearly identical, but not quite. I arbitrarily decided to keep the later version, once I deduced which that was.

...and for any of the Blogger development team who happen to be wandering through - Stop laughing, you sadistic nerds!

Introducing: MBS Blogroll 3.0

For years, readers have asked me to make the blogroll more usable. I fiddled with various widgets and such before deciding last year that no single blogroll could meet every reader's needs. At that time, I created separate chronological and alphabetic blogrolls. The former shows the latest updates while the latter displays all links.

Both blogrolls have been popular, but with over 400 links, it became impractical to explore blogs of a particular genre. Some blogs have names that describe their content, but many do not.

Today, it is my pleasure to unveil the MBS blogroll 3.0. The links in the alphabetic blogroll are now color-coded to indicate the types of content behind each link. This is a work in progress and I expect to tweak it considerably before declaring it finished.

The toughest part of this upgrade, and the reason I hadn't attempted it before now, is classifying blogs. Many blogs fall into multiple categories and some simply defy classification. MBS, for example, doesn't fit comfortably into any of the new categories. These links remain the same color they've always been.

Despite the slightly untidy classification process, I think the result is a blogroll that will help visitors to select links that will be of interest to them.

What do you think? Does this new approach add value to the blogroll? How might we make it better/easier/clearer?

If I mislabeled your blog or a blog you like, please send me an e-mail and I will fix it.

Thank you in advance for your feedback!

Blogroll Update

Hi, everybody, and welcome to the weekend!  As you may have noticed, our spring cleaning around the blog has gone very well (Thank you, Hermione!).  I wanted to follow up on our recent blogroll poll.  MBS readers confirmed by a wide margin my belief that the blogroll is valuable and worth the time it takes to maintain.

By a 2-to-1 margin, you said you weren't very interested in links to blogs written in languages other than English.  I have mixed feelings about this.  My inclination is to return links from legitimate blogs with similar content.  In addition, an English-only policy seems uncomfortably provincial to me.  However, as a practical matter, my lack of understanding of languages like Spanish, German, Czech, and Danish leaves me unable to assess the content of these blogs.  A link from me is a recommendation, or at least a suggestion.  I don't feel as though I can send MBS readers to a blog that I am unable to read.  I may change my mind, but for now, that's how we will handle this question.

The alphabetical versus chronological vote was a lot closer than I expected.  While a majority preferred the status quo alphabetical list, a sizable minority opted for the most recently updated format.  The only practical solution was to do both.  If you haven't seen it yet, I added a time-based blogroll at the bottom of the right column.  By default, it displays only the most recent 25 blogs.  However, readers can expand it to show all blogs.

I'm pretty enthusiast about this new blogroll.  Were I inclined toward hyperbole, I might claim that it's bigger than the Universe and better connected than the Network.  But I'll let you be the judge.  Whether you're looking for an old favorite or seek to discover the latest and greatest, I think you'll find there's something here for every spanking enthusiast.

I was pleased to see that the results from the content question were in line with my current practice.  The types of blogs you said you wanted to see linked are the same ones I've been trying to find.

I'm still pondering some sort of category notation on the alphabetical blogroll.  The challenge is that many blogs fit into multiple categories.  I don't want five little marks after a blog name.  Nor do I want to list a versatile blog in five different places.  At that point, the updates become insane.

I am grateful to MBS readers for telling me what you like (and sometimes don't like).  Working together, I believe we can make this a better blog.