Alternatives to BlogRolling.com?

Since BlogRolling​.com was acquired by Tucows in 2004, the only thing con­sis­tent about it has been the con­stant out­ages and ser­vice fail­ures. It’s time to walk away from BlogRolling​.com and find–or build–an alternative.
BlogRolling.com Doesn't Work
It’s time for a change.

A cou­ple of days ago I received a laugh­able reminder from BlogRolling​.com to renew my sub­scrip­tion to ser­vice outages:

Hello from Blogrolling HQ, 

We hope you are enjoy­ing your Blogrolling​.com sub­scrip­tion. Your cur­rent ser­vice is due for renew­al on April 6, 2005. In order to con­tin­ue using your Blogrolling.com’s ser­vices, you will need to renew your sub­scrip­tion by that date.

[snipped]

Thank you for your sub­scrib­ing to Blogrolling​.com. We look for­ward to serv­ing you for many more years to come.

If you have any ques­tions or con­cerns, please con­tact us at support@​blogrolling.​com.

Sincerely,

Ross Rader,
on behalf of Tucows and Blogrolling​.com

So Ross actu­al­ly thinks I’ll pay US$19.95 to renew a ser­vice that is down near­ly as often as it is up? For a ser­vice that was actu­al­ly use­ful and well-maintained until Tucows bought it up and for­got about it?

Tucows is the trail­er trash Microsoft, buy­ing up what­ev­er poten­tial­ly prof­itable tech­nol­o­gy it can, then park­ing it on a shelf to gath­er dust. True to form, innovation–indeed, even rou­tine maintenance!–shuts down the moment the acqui­si­tion con­tract is signed, and noth­ing hap­pens until it’s time for Tucows to stick out its hand.

Before Tucows, BlogRolling​.com had occas­sion­al prob­lems, but they were fixed effi­cient­ly. More impor­tant­ly, they were com­mu­ni­cat­ed via the site’s blog to the users. It was a dia­logue that kept us in the loop and let us know that some­one knew about the prob­lems and was work­ing on them.

After Tucows… Well, just look at BlogRolling.com’s “Breaking News” blog.

Tucows acquired the ubiq­ui­tious blogroll provider in ear­ly 2004, at which point a string of show-stopper tech­ni­cal issues began. And, when BlogRolling​.com has an out­age or tech­ni­cal prob­lem, it affects thou­sands of blogs that incor­po­rate a blogroll into their pages. From March through May 2004 there are 21 posts about crit­i­cal por­tions of, or the entire, sys­tem failing.

Then the posts stop, jump­ing from May until September despite par­tial or total ser­vice out­ages in between.

The September 9th announce­ment about a planned main­te­nance win­dow exem­pli­fies both Tucows’ dis­re­gard for sub­scribers of the BlogRolling​.com ser­vice, and Tucows’ inep­ti­tude for run­ning an online ser­vice: “We are going to be doing some serv­er upgrades next Wednesday ( September 15, 2004) between 12:00pm and 3:00pm Eastern dur­ing which time you will not be able to dis­play or update your blogrolls.” 

As com­men­tor Steve points out, “the mid­dle of the day…bloggers busiest time…seems an odd selec­tion for a 3 hour main­te­nance win­dow. Such things are usu­al­ly done dur­ing users’ slack­est times, for exam­ple, mid­night to 3 am or, at least, a Sunday morn­ing.” Indeed. Steve con­tin­ues: “I sus­pect that large num­bers of your users–90% or more–still have no idea that you are plan­ning this main­te­nance” because the announce­ment was made via the neglect­ed “Breaking News” blog.

To Steve’s point Ross Rader replies: “MIddle of the day–it all depends on your per­spec­tive. We…need to coor­di­nate teams on the east and west coast of the U.S.”

Perspective… Interesting. 12:00pm through 3:00pm Eastern Time is 9:00am through 12:00pm Pacific Time–the busiest times for blogs in any North American time zone. Is one then to assume that Tucows’ per­spec­tive is that planned out­ages should affect the great­est num­ber of subscribers?

After more net­work out­age and ser­vice fail­ure announce­ments in September, “Breaking News” is qui­et until just a few weeks ago. In January there is an announce­ment of a token attempt at improv­ing the service–a first attempt at a no-brainer fea­ture to allow sub­scribers to change their user­names. But ear­ly March, a time cor­re­spond­ing to when BlogRolling​.com first began to pick up momen­tum with paid sub­scrip­tions two years ago, is when Ross sud­den­ly begins post­ing again. Regrettably, it is not to announce new fea­tures or even the com­ple­tion of the sim­ple user­name change fea­ture that is still, after two months, in beta.

Instead, the announce­ments are more weak apolo­gies for ser­vice outages–of course, with­out esti­mat­ed time of repair. Reading the trou­ble reports, one gets the dis­tinct impres­sion that Ross, new­com­er Dan, and the rest of the Tucows team have no idea why prob­lems are hap­pen­ing on their sys­tems or how to fix them.

After a year under Tucows own­er­ship, the only thing con­sis­tent about the BlogRolling​.com ser­vice is its unreliability.

I have watched my sites’ BlogRolling.com-hosted blogrolls and those of dozens of oth­er blogs I read dis­ap­pear, dis­play errors, or fail to receive post­ing updates for the past year. Worse, when BlogRolling​.com goes down, it often dras­ti­cal­ly slows the dis­play of all blogs that include one of its blogrolls.

In my opin­ion, BlogRolling​.com is no longer a usable service.

If the aver­age blog­ger had to deal with con­stant out­ages from her ISP, hosting-provider, or blog soft­ware, she would have walked away from that ISP, hosting-provider, or blog soft­ware long before this. So why don’t we walk away from BlogRolling​.com?

With blogrolls built into most of today’s blog­ging soft­ware, is a ser­vice like BlogRolling​.com need­ed? What about Del.ici.ous and Technorati tags? Are they serv­ing the same pur­pose? Are there direct alter­na­tives to BlogRolling​.com out there? Has any­one had expe­ri­ence with them?

If there are not yet alter­na­tives to BlogRolling​.com, let’s build one. If you have the pro­gram­ming skill and a viable idea for either an open-source or for-profit ser­vice to improve upon BlogRolling​.com, con­tact me. I’ll help build and back it.

PS: Ross Rader, I will not be renew­ing my sub­scrip­tion to BlogRolling​.com on 6 April.

10 thoughts on “Alternatives to BlogRolling.com?”

  1. Allan

    I’m con­sid­er­ing switch­ing to Bloglines for my link management.

    TypePad’s type­lists are not very flex­i­ble in terms of sort­ing , and oth­er diplay options. 

    But I am paid up with Blogrolling for anoth­er ten months, so I will prob­a­bly stick with it unless the prob­lems get any worse.

  2. Tab

    I think you hit the nail on the head – gath­er­ing togeth­er to build a new one. this isn’t rock­et sci­ence, and im con­stant­ly puz­zled by the ghosts in the machine they speak of, and cant find. Your right about one thing, the lack of-service is far more wide­spread than the break­ing news indicates..
    Sign me up for the mutiny, ..Aye Mr. Christian lets roll away to Pitcairn isle.

  3. Samuel John Klein

    I have a blogrolling link on my own blog but I almost nev­er both­er with it now. I know enough basic html to code the links myself by hand anyway…it’s not like I’m actu­al­ly pop­u­lar or anything…B-)

  4. DT

    Inclusion of links in a web page can be done using server-side includes or even client-side includes, refer­ring to a sta­t­ic page on your own web site (under your con­trol) that is itself anoth­er blog data stream. Blogger​.com describes both tech­niques here.

  5. Sandy

    As some­one try­ing to sign up with Blogroll,your com­ments were the first encour­ag­ing sign I found on the site of actu­al human intervention.

    I’ve asked over and over to be mailed anoth­er reac­ti­va­tion code because I nev­er received the first, even tried a new email address, but noth­ing. Any ideas would be great

  6. Sandy

    oh, here’s my just start­ing out blog’s address I for­got to add it in the pre­vi­ous comments.

  7. Anselmus

    Like Sandy, I haven’t had the chance to find out how bad blogrolling is ’cause I can’t cre­ate an account. I’ve tried from 4 dif­fer­ent email accounts, but not received an acti­va­tion email. What are they doing??

  8. Pariah S. Burke

    They’re doing noth­ing. That’s the point.

    I mean, look at the this post you’re read­ing. It not only crit­i­cizes BlogRolling​.com, but it bla­tant­ly solic­its com­pe­ti­tion to that service.

    And how are many of you com­ing to it? Exactly: Via a link on BlogRolling​.com.

    They aren’t even mon­i­tor­ing their own track­backs. They used to though–here–read the comments.

  9. jim

    I have expe­ri­enced the same prob­lems with my blogrolls. I was a pay­ing mem­ber, back before it was owned by Tucows and it was great. If there was a planned out­age, you were noti­fied, if there was a prob­lem, there was infor­ma­tion of what was going on and why. Now, It’s up and down like a yoyo. I had to renew mine and it was­n’t as bad as it has become, but when I tried to com­plete my renew­al, they don’t take Paypal any­more! I sent emails to sup­port sev­er­al times and nev­er get a response back. It’s frus­trat­ing, let’s replace them!

  10. Saratica

    Late to the game, I’m quit­ting blogrolling now, man­u­al­ly enter­ing all my blogrolls to my type­pad lists. I’m also research­ing all oth­er options. Haven’t found a viable alter­na­tive in the hour I’ve been trolling. Have you come up with any­thing? Thank you!

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