With all the bouncing back and forth with site design, you’d think I’d get tired of it and would just leave well enough alone.

Ha!  Ain’t gonna happen.

My latest quirky notion revolves around the blogroll.

I think it’s too long to be useful.  Right now, it’s just a lengthy list of links.  With so many of them, no one can wade through that and determine which of them they might like to visit.

Mind you, I think blogrolls are insignificant in the scheme of things.  What’s more important is when people link to a blog in a post.  That shows action, intent, and familiarity with the blog.  Having it in a list of blogs (i.e., blogroll) means little since you can link until your heart’s content without ever visiting them.  Linking in a post, however, is something else entirely.

Nevertheless, I maintain the blogroll as a public version of my regular haunts.  Anything listed represents a site I read constantly—daily for almost all of them, and at least weekly for the few that don’t post as often.

In order to make the blogroll less daunting and certainly friendlier, I’m wondering if it’s time to reintroduce categories.

You might remember I dropped them last time because they became too hard to maintain.

If I put them back in place, I want to do something a bit simpler.  I’d use broad classifications like photography, nature, pets, and writing.  I’d place each blog according to my own impression of their general theme (i.e., what do they talk about most).

The idea is to lessen the impact of the overall list while demonstrating some logical identification of what you can find at each one.

Again, the categories would be broad and wouldn’t always identify everything going on at that site, but they would certainly help to narrow down the list if you’re looking for specific things to read.

Keep in mind it would still introduce false dichotomies and unintentional disparities.  For instance, if a site is a nature photoblog, does it go in nature or photography?  Another example is if a blog is mostly a nature blog that includes photos, does it go in photography or nature?

I’d keep that simple.  Photography would be for photoblogs regardless of content.  Nature would be for those blogs, with or without photos, that deal primarily with the natural world.  And so on…

I’d try not to make it overly complicated, the same fate that befell it originally and that caused me to consolidate the entire list.  My hope would be to keep that from happening while simultaneously providing some form of guidance about what each one offers.

But I don’t want to do it if it’s going to become another nightmare, and I also don’t want to do it if it’s an exercise in futility (i.e., it doesn’t matter one way or the other to any of you).

So, if you care, what say you?