How to Make a Links List (Fast & Cheap)

After fielding questions from several of you, I find that I need to clarify the links list (blogroll) assignment.

First, links lists and news aggregators are two different things.

Links List

Links lists appear in the sidebar of your blog, and contain links to anything on the web you want. When people visit your blog, they can see links to sites that you deem important or interesting. You can put many different links lists in your sidebar(s). My blog has several, as you can see.

News Aggregator

A news aggregator is a separate application (either running on your local computer, as with Pluck and NetNewsWire; or on a web sever accessible with a web browser, as with Bloglines). A news aggregator allows you to get the latest updates, or headlines, of other people's blogs (some traditional web sites are syndicated too).

Part of the confusion here is probably coming from those of you who have elected to use the Bloglines service. Bloglines lets you set up both (links lists and news aggregation) from a single interface.

Some of you have already used Bloglines to display a links list in your sidebar with links to your classmates' blogs. That's fine. But it is not required. What I want to see is that you have made a links list (or several) with at least a few links underneath. Those links can be to any sites on the web you find interesting and worth sharing with the rest of us.

If you use the Bloglines service (instead of the Blogrolling service), the links that can appear in your links lists will be limited to sites that can be syndicated (RSS or Atom). So, for example, Bloglines will not allow you to link to CNN.com, since CNN.com has no Atom or RSS feed.

If you use Bloglines and you still want to add sites that are not syndicated to your links list, do it manually. Simply follow the instructions for making a link in your blog post that I gave you here. Once you've made the HTML tag that links to a website you choose, paste it into the Template of your blog, above the "Archives" section. The instructions here are helpful; just substitute the HTML tag you made for the block of Javascript code in the example I gave.

Or, here's a brief description of how to do it:

1. Go to your Blogger Dashboard.

2. Choose your Study Guide Blog.

3. Choose the "Template" tab.

4. Scroll down inside the template window until you see this:
   <MainOrArchivePage> <h2 class="sidebar-title">Archives</h2>

   The first line of code above simply tells us that what follows is code to make the archive appear on the blog. The second line of code above creates the heading for the links list named "Archives." We want our new links list to appear above the archives list. We also want our new links list to have a heading that looks like the other headings in our sidebar.

5. So next let's copy and paste the Archives heading code above the archives section; that is, on top of the two lines in the example above:
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">Archives</h2>
   <MainOrArchivePage> <h2 class="sidebar-title">Archives</h2>

6. Now let's change the title of the heading to My Favorite Sites:
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">My Favorite Sites</h2>
   <MainOrArchivePage> <h2 class="sidebar-title">Archives</h2>

7. Now let's add a couple of links underneath! Don't forget to manually add a line break between them. This has to be done when working in the template.
   <h2 class="sidebar-title">My Favorite Sites</h2> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/">BBC News</a> <br> <a href="http://freshair.npr.org/">Fresh Air</a>
   <MainOrArchivePage> <h2 class="sidebar-title">Archives</h2>

8. Save changes and publish.

You've got a links list!