Today’s Blog Tip: Compress Your Blogrolls!
- Posted by Beth on March 31st, 2008 filed in Blogs, General, Pseudogeek stuff blog tips
Not that anyone asked, but too bad.
Dear Blogger,
When you have a whole bunch of blogrolls or reeeeally long blogrolls–no, I’m not going to rag on you about having a bunch of blogrolls, as I have that particular stupid affliction myself–PLEASE, for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE compress them so your blogrolls don’t scroll five miles past the oldest post on your page. Constructive criticism: It looks like shite. Really.
Here’s an easy fix that requires no more technical expertise than sticking that Blogrolling script in the sidebar does. You can change the width/height if you wish; this is just a basic example that works to create a scroll box:
<div style="overflow:auto; padding: 4px; width: 160px; height: 220px;">
(your blogrolling script)
</div>
That’s it.
Here it is in action, using one of my blogrolls:
See how the lines wrapped, too? That’s where adjusting the width will help.
<div style="font-size: 10px; overflow:auto; padding: 4px; width: 200px; height: 220px;">
(blogrolling script)
</div>
Alternatively, you could set the font-size to be smaller. Like this:
<div style="font-size: 10px; overflow:auto; padding: 4px; width: 160px; height: 220px;">
(blogrolling script)
</div>
Right, so you noticed I don’t use this on my own blog. I use this. There are other methods for drop-down menus, of course; look around here just to start.
By the way, all those buttons in your sidebar? You can “hide” those too, if you want. Just stick the code in there instead of a blogrolling script.
And yes, Google and the TTLB Ecosystem and all that will still “see” the links just as if you hadn’t done any of this at all.
Michael schuyler says:
I have a related question. I notice that the very same blog roll can appear differently on different sites. I keep the MV08 blog roll and I always put “New!” on a new site for a week or two just to give them a little extra visibility. I use one of the extra fields on Blogrolling itself. On SOME sites the “New!” appears in a contrasting color, like red. On others there is no color difference at all. I assume it must be related to the color scheme of the blog itself. It can’t be in the code, which is the same on both kinds of blogs.
Beth says:
Right, it’s because of the blog’s CSS–like you said, the color scheme. For example, all the links in my sidebar are styled a certain way, and blogrolling inherits the CSS from my site. You can, of course, set a different style for blogrolling links, but it has to be done on an individual basis per blog.
In my case, I’ve changed the style so the links on my blogroll are NOT underlined like the other links are. (Really, I’m not sure why I haven’t gotten rid of the underline everywhere, but it particularly bothered me in the blogroll because it made it harder to read.)
Are you having problems with the MV08 blogroll?
Michael schuyler says:
I had some self-inflicted (so no purple heart) issues about a month ago because of the top graphic that are now fixed. (I had a very fast lesson on Photobucket!) However, there are a couple of versions of the code floating out there now as a result. Once in awhile, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, everything just goes away. I think this is when Blogrolling.com is down. On the whole I’m happy with the blogroll site itself. I’ve also noticed that the more calls to afar for pics, rolls, or anything, the slower a blog will load. That’s standard web procedure, of course, but seems particularly bad on blogs. So moderation in all things, I’ve cut back a bit. Thanks for the compression lesson. My roll did it, but I didn’t know why.