For a long time, the Blogroll has been an important part of any blog – the place where writers link to other like-minded bloggers, or to sites they find interesting. But I’ve just done away with mine.

To have a pretty static list of sites I read is pretty pointless. It gives no idea of which ones I read every word of, it gives no idea of which particular posts I like, and no clue as to who I link to because I love them, and who I link to because I feel I should.

So I’ve replaced my traditional Blogroll with a new-fangled section called ‘Stuff I Read & Liked’. Basically, now I’ve permanently switched from Bloglines to Google Reader as my RSS reader of choice, I can mark posts I like with a single click – and then they appear on here. The most recent 15 items I’ve marked in this way appear in the sidebar, and the most recent 500 appear on a specially designed part of the site, here (always accessible from the ‘More stuff like this’ under the list in the sidebar). I’ve only just started doing this, so I’m not quite up to 500 yet!

I had previously been put off going doing this route because of the inflexibility of the ‘clip’ that Google provided, but with a little bit of lateral thinking and CSS coding, it was actually quite easy to style it and get it into a format I wanted. I think, overall, it provides a more logical and useful solution to crediting my influences.

I’d previously not been convinced by Google Reader, preferring Bloglines’ simplicity. But, finally, Google have won me over. Their product has improved immensely over the last few months, and there are now so many different ways of accessing your feeds that I hardly ever need to visit the main Google Reader interface. I’m definitely converted.

I hope that the new style Blogroll will encourage my readers to explore some of the other blogs I read, and allow you to get a better appreciation of my influences. I like it, and I hope that you do too.