BlogRolling Will Cease Operation November 1st, 2010

From their site:

BlogRolling will be shutting down November 1st, 2010.

If you are not using BlogRolling code on your site anymore, you don’t need to do anything.

If you are using BlogRolling code on your site, you’ll want to follow these simple steps before the end of this month.

Get Your Links

If you want a list of the links in your BlogRoll, you have two options

1. Sign in to your BlogRolling account to cut and paste links out of your control panel.
2. Go to a page on your site that contains your blogroll and click on each link in your blogroll and copy down or bookmark the links you end up on.

Sorry, there is no “export” option in BlogRolling.

Clean Your Code

1. Remove the blogrolling JavaScript code from your site.
2. Not sure where the code is? “View Source” on your pages and search for “blogrolling” in the code.

Thanks for your support and patronage these many years! Happy blogging!

Note: 1389AD has already migrated 1389 Blog‘s blogrolls from BlogRolling.com to the built-in WordPress widgets. That involved manually copying and pasting roughly a thousand links. To my knowledge, at this time there is no available WordPress script plugin that would substitute for BlogRolling. It would be convenient to have an automatic mechanism to let other people display copies of one’s own blogrolls, but that feature apparently does not exist at this time.

Gotten any malware warning messages lately?

Some people have recently seen malware warning notices whenever they access any blog that contains a blogroll (or link list) sponsored by BlogRolling. Among the blogs that have been affected are two blogs belonging to 1389AD, namely 1389 Blog and 1389 Message Blog.

You may be relieved to know that the security alerts are a false alarm. I have since moved the Blogrolling link lists to a separate page, so that the messages will not come up when readers attempt to access blog posts.

If you own or administer a blog or website that displays a link list via BlogRolling, you will need to be aware of this. Malware warning notices can frighten and upset visitors to your blog, even if the notices are bogus.

BlogRolling may disappear soon

After being told about this, I visited the BlogRolling News & Status page. Here’s what I found:

Update on BlogRolling

SAT SEP 18th, 2010

We’re aware that there is an issue with BlogRolling blogrolls causing some browsers to display a security warning.

There’s nothing really wrong with BlogRolling itself but the way we connect your blog to the sites in your blogroll makes some security algorithms think there is.

If you find yourself in this situation, we recommend you remove the Blogrolling code from your site.

We’re probably going to be shutting the service down soon. We’ll post more information here and on our Twitter account (@blogrolling) as we decide on next steps.

We’re hoping we can give you enough time to get any data you need out of your blogrolling account before we shut down, but if you really need that data, you might want to get it now just in case.

Why aren’t we just fixing it and letting you continue using the service?

BlogRolling has largely been on auto-pilot for the last six months or so. The people who built it for us don’t work for us anymore. Even though it doesn’t make us any money, we wanted to keep it running because we know folks like it. But we’re not really comfortable with the code causing security warnings and that means it’s probably time for the service to end.

Thanks for your support. Stay tuned for more details in the next few days.

What to do?

If you are using BlogRolling to manage your blogrolls or link lists, you will need to get your links out of BlogRolling and put them somewhere else for safekeeping. As far as I know, there is no easy way to do this.

• As an emergency measure for making a rudimentary backup of your links, you can login to your BlogRolling account, then click the link to “My BlogRolls” if that page is not already visible, then click “Get BlogRolling Code” on your blogroll.

  Then scroll down to the “RSS” subheader, click to select the code. Copy and paste the URL into your favorite RSS feed reader, just as you would do with any new feed subscription. If you don’t already have a feed reader, you can use Google Reader.

• You can also select “Add/Edit Links” for the desired blogroll, then use your browser menu to Select All and Copy each page of links. Paste each page of links into a text file, using Notepad or something similar.

After that, if you want your links to be available to readers on your blog, you will have to re-enter them into whatever widget your blogging software provides for managing link lists. Unless someone decides to provide some software for automating this, it will be a time-consuming and arduous task. I have nearly a thousand links in BlogRolling at this point, so I expect it to take me awhile.

Blogrolling.com still experiencing outages

Problems being worked on as of 9:30pm EST 10/16/08

1389 Blog reported earlier that the popular Blogrolling.com link list server site was hacked by Islamists. Since that time, the site’s home page has gone offline repeatedly, and the blogrolls hosted on the site are being served only intermittently.

Status updates from blogrolling on Twitter

Because Blogrolling obviously can’t use its own site to provide status updates, the Blogrolling staff has set up a blogrolling user ID on Twitter. As long as the main Blogrolling.com site is down, it will redirect automatically to the Twitter page, which will display status updates. You can follow it from your own Twitter user ID if you wish.

H/T to Texas Fred for this information.

An unpleasant surprise

Earlier today, I accessed Blogrolling to add some entries to “1389′s Links.” This list appears in the 1389 Blog sidebar, and it offers a whole variety of links to sites that I find interesting, informative, or entertaining, and that readers might like to see also.

This is what came up:

Needless to say, I made no effort to contact ejder2121@windowslive.com.

What is Blogrolling anyway?

How you can use it

Many bloggers and blog readers have seen lists of links to other blogs that are hosted and maintained through a service called Blogrolling. This service offers a home page that lets you open an account, set up and populate your own blogrolls and link lists, and generate Javascript code to display the link lists on your blog or website. You can distribute this Javascript code so that others can display shared blogrolls on their sites. For example, 1389 Blog maintains a shared blogroll for the Stop Blog Censorship campaign, which you can see in the sidebar.

Advantages and disadvantages

Blogrolling has its advantages and disadvantages, but overall, I’m a big fan of it, because of its convenience, stability, and ease of use. It has features for sorting blogrolls by most recent blog update, for searching blogrolls, for finding out who has blogrolled you, and for backing up blogroll links. On the other hand, because Blogrolling uses Javascript to build the link lists for display on your page, Google will not index the the links, and will not use the links to raise the page rank of the blogs on the list. And if you put too many blogrolls on the same page, it will introduce delays in loading the page, especially for readers without broadband service. That is why most of our blogrolls have been moved to the Links resource page.

Why would anybody hack Blogrolling?

That’s a good question.

Blogrolling is simply a hosting service for link lists, open to both commercial and noncommercial sites. To the best of my knowledge, Blogrolling takes no political, religious, or ideological stance.

Yes, it’s true that some conservative, antijihadist, pro-Christian, and pro-Jewish blogs and blog groups use Blogrolling – to name a few: Center for Vigilant Freedom, Bear Flag League, The Hillbilly Ecosystem, Screw the UN, International Zionist Web, The Tennessee ConserVOLiance, Christian Blogosphere, Right Truth, and the Crescent of Betrayal Blogburst.

So is that why the Blogrolling site was hacked? Most unlikely! Not only are there plenty of sites on Blogrolling that hold views that oppose ours, but also, it is clear that the vast majority of sites that use Blogrolling are commercial blogs that express no particular point of view either for or against the Islamist agenda.

So what would be the point of hacking Blogrolling?

Maybe there was no real point, or at least no point that would make any sense. Maybe the miscreant(s) were motivated simply by a desire to prove that they have the ability to make nuisances of themselves by interfering with a site that many people use. To be sure, that’s not much of an accomplishment. It takes a lot less talent and ability to break in and mess up a web page than it takes to create and run a good site. Blogrolling will most likely notify the authorities and then get their site up and running again with enhanced security. And what will people think who happen to see the hacked site? They’ll most likely be inclined to feel more negatively toward jihadism, Islam, and Muslims in general than they already do.

Shortly after FHK launched we began searching for ways to increase our rankings on the search engines. The prevailing wisdom was that one good way to do this is to maintain a blogroll (that’s the ridiculously long list of blogs in the sidebar of many blogs), as it is a good way for bloggers to exchange much needed “links,” increase their link count, and move up in the ratings.

There were a few “monster” blogrolls that everyone was trying to get on, and I had one particular one in mind. I e-mailed, and begged and pleaded, and finally, the administrator of the blogroll heard my cries and added Ft. Hard Knox to his blogroll. I was so excited, because I was sure my ratings would double over night. Afterall, Ft. Hard Knox had just been added to every major blogroll in the conservative blogosphere! So I watched Technorati…and watched…lost some sleep watching that night…and guess what?! I didn’t get one single link on Technorati as a result of being added to that HUGE blogroll.

To make matters worse, my link count on Technorati actually started dropping over the next few weeks.

Something had to be wrong…I checked around, and sure enough, the blogroll administrator had done everything correctly. We were there – on all of these blogrolls, but the links weren’t being counted on Technorati. The blogroll administrator was using the popular blogroll service, Blogrolling, which is also the one we were using.

So I began researching. To my disappointment, I learned that blogroll links contained within javascript are no longer counted on Technorati, and neither are any links over six months old. So, no only were we not getting additional links from being added to the blogroll, but links from the bloggers I’d convinced to trade links with us six months ago were dropping off.

What to do?

Fortunately, we use WordPress for our blog, and I’ve checked, and the links from the WordPress blogrolls ARE still counting on Technorati (the other search engines like Google are harder to gauge, because they are not up-front about how their calculations are performed).

If you have a bunch of blogrolls on Blogrolling, you can simply use the OPML code from those blogrolls to import your links to WordPress.

That’s easier than it sounds.

1. Log in to Blogrolling
2. Click “Get Code” under the blogroll you want to import to WordPress
3. Scroll down to “OPML” and click “Click to select the code”
4. Log in to your WordPress blog, and go to the Dashboard
5. Mouseover “Blogroll,” then click “Import Links” on the drop-down menu
6. Under “Specify an OPML URL:” paste the OPML code you just copied from Blogrolling
7. Click on the “Import OPML File” button

That’s it…the links will appear on your blogroll. If you’re consolidating more than one Blogrolling blogroll, you may now need to weed through you WordPress blogroll and delete the duplicates. Within a day or two, your links will be showing on your blog friends’ link counts on Technorati.

Now, all you have to do is convince your friends to reciprocate the favor. Again. Good luck.

Also see:

• How to Prevent your Blog from Leaking Pagerank
• Technorati FAQ
• Technorati Wacks Blogrolling