Blogrolling.com is a service that provides easy-to-manage list of links for use in any web page or weblog. It makes the task of filling and updating linklists or "blogrolls" simple, and it's especially useful for people whose blogging tools don't have a blogroll facility. There are two types of Blogrolling.com accounts: free, which gives you one blogroll, and the paid Gold account, which gives you up to ten blogrolls and some extra features.

There's a little overlap with Blogware's Favorites lists and Blogrolling.com blogrolls; both allow you to create list of links which you can include in the sidebar, header or footer of your weblog. You might be asking "Which should I use?", and the answer to that question is "It depends."

My preference is to use a Blogrolling.com blogroll for lists of links to weblogs, and Favorites lists for lists of links to other sites. Blogrolling.com blogrolls have some features that make them particularly well-suited to lists of weblogs, most notably the way it can highlight recently-updated ones. You can choose to highlight recently-updated weblogs, or have your Blogrolling.com blogroll sorted so that weblogs are listed from most- to least-recently updated. Blogrolling.com blogrolls also allow you to break them up into small groups, arrange your lists into shapes, and provide an "I'm Feeling Lucky" link, which if clicked, takes the reader to a weblog selected at random from your list.

Blogware's Favorites lists have the advantage of being built into Blogware (meaning you don't have to do any extra work). Unlike Blogrolling.com, which limits you to one blogroll if you have a free account or 10 if you have a paid one, Blogware lets you have as many Favorites lists as you want. With a little creative template editing, you can use them to do all kinds of things that I'll cover in a future entry.

Here's what you'll need for this exercise:

• A Blogware blog (naturally)
• A Blogrolling.com account (either a free one or a Gold one will do)
• A blogroll in your Blogrolling.com account that contains at least on item

Here's a summary of the steps that we'll follow to include a Blogrolling.com blogroll into your blog:

• Login to Blogrolling.com and copy the JavaScript code that renders the blogroll
• Login to the Blogware control panel for your blog and create a custom component for the blogroll
• Activate the custom component

Let's begin!

1. Login to Blogrolling.com, and click the Get Code link for the blogroll that you want to show in your weblog.



The Get Code link will take you to the Code Generator page. This page contains different text that you can copy and use to include your blogroll into your weblog.


2. Scroll down to the section titled JAVASCRIPT and copy the text from the text box in that section.

The text that you're copying is some Javascript that generates the blogroll. You can either select the text manually or if you have JavaScript enabled, you can click the Click to select the code link to select it in its entirety. Once you have selected the code, copy it.




3. Login to the Blogware Control Panel and go to the Advanced subsection of the Look and feel section.

Login to the Control Panel, and then click the Look and Feel tab on the Navigation Bar. Then click on the Advanced tab.



You will now be in the Advanced subsection, where you can create new components.


4. Enter a name for the new component into the Name field and paste the JavaScript you copied from Blogrolling.com into the Content field.

In this example, I gave my component the name "Blogrolling - Linky Love", pasted the Javascript copied from Blogrolling.com into the Content field and clicked the Add Component button.




5. [Optional] Add any extra code you want to include with the component.

I've decided to embellish my blogroll by including the Blogrolling.com logo above the list of links, center-justify both logo and list, and guarantee some room above and below the component by putting it inside <p></p> tags. The contents of the Content text field now look like this:

<p>
<center>
<a href="http://blogrolling.com"><img src="http://accordionguy.blogware.com/Components/blogrolling.com_logo.jpg"></a>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php?r=[this part will be different for every blog]"></script>
</center>
</p>


6. Click the Add Component button to create the component and save it.

After clicking the Add Component button, the Custom Components list will include your newly created component, shown highlighted below.



7. Click the Columns tab to lay out the lay out the newly-created component in your sidebar.



This will take you to the column layout section, where you can activate the blogroll component and choose a place for it.


8. Select the blogroll component and drag it to the sidebar where you would like to place it.





For this example, I've dropped the blogroll component into the left column and made it the second one from the top.

Once you have dropped the component into the desired location, click the Save button at the bottom of the page.



Here's what the page will look like: