BatesLine's blogrolls

A request from a fellow blogger for reciprocal blogrolling (adding each other to our respective lists of recommended blogs) reminded me that I got away from the traditional blogroll (long lists of links to blog home pages) some time ago in favor of aggregation. The old system provided a prominent link whether the blog had been updated recently or not. Aggregation focuses attention on bloggers who are actively publishing new material.

I use Google Reader to keep track of the blogs I want to follow and have set up four pages where you can find headlines and links for the most recent 100 articles from those blogs. It does this by aggregating the RSS (syndication) feeds from each blog. If you're bored waiting for my next post, I invite you to visit one of these four pages to find something worth reading:

BatesLine op-ed headlines: Latest opinion and feature stories from the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages, National Review, and American Spectator
BatesLine Tulsa headlines: Latest opinion and feature stories from Tulsa-area bloggers
BatesLine Oklahoma headlines: Latest opinion and feature stories from Oklahoma bloggers
BatesLine blogroll headlines: Latest opinion and feature stories from (nearly) all the blogs I follow

The last three categories are nested; you'll find headlines from Tulsa bloggers on the Oklahoma page, and headlines from Oklahoma bloggers on the blogroll page. The headlines on those three pages are mutually exclusive of those on the op-ed page, since the op-ed publishers tend to publish a large number of new articles at a set time each night.

(There are a few blogs I read regularly that I exclude from these pages because of their occasional use of off-color language in headlines, which I don't want appearing on my website.)

I started out using NewsGator for this purpose, until they discontinued their aggregation service for websites. In addition to headline and source, NewsGator also made a brief excerpt of the article and the date and time published available for display, and I miss having that information.