Blogrolling.com is shutting down

I received a message from the good people at blogrolling.com that says they are shutting down the service. This was their message.

We're in the process of shutting down Blogrolling, so if you still have the widget code on your site, you should remove it now.
Best of luck.

These means the end of the Atheist Blogroll as we know it. You should remove the code from your blog.  But do not despair! Another solution is just around the corner.

I managed to capture a complete list of Atheist Blogs a few weeks ago. I will have a code snipit up soon with a new badge pointing people to the full list. We can use that as a way to maintain the membership in the short run.

Long term, I have a solution that will put us back in business. I was able to work with a friend who is a programmer. We’ve created our own blogrolling service. I know the server side works fine, but we don’t have the client tools nailed down yet. It’s been on the shelf for a few months. I’ll dust it off and get it back into production as soon as I can.

I need a few things:

  1. Time… This will take a little time. We are both gainfully employed, so we can only work on it in our spare time.
  2. Testers… We will need to do a full up test of the service. I need a few volunteers to work on the project.
  3. A name… We don’t have a name for the application. Blogrolling is already taken and has a big negative connotation already. So please suggest a name.
  4. A server… We need to host the server someplace. I need help here.

We had never really thought of this as a commercially viable product. I was just unsatisfied with Blogrolling.com that I was looking for an alternative. It is possible that we could offer the service to other bloggers. If you are interested, please let me know.

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5 comments:

Lugosi said...

When did you get that email about blogrolling? Mine is still working provided I access my blog through IE. It's only on Firefox that it doesn't show up.

Godlessons said...

Google Chrome has been giving warnings to pages that link to blogrolling.com, and so I had to remove the code. I went to their support site and they say they have no intent to fix the problem, and are in the process of shutting down the service.

Anyway, as for the new blogrolling type setup, it is trivial to pull a dynamically generated page from a server with pure javascript. If the server side of things is already set, you should be able to generate a page that only serves the blogroll in a format ready for insertion. If you want to store more data and format it, it could be served in xml format and formatted with a javascript library kept on the server. (The library on the server is to keep the client javascript simple.)

Anyway, if there is a server side program already, the client side should be a piece of cake.

Unknown said...

I'd love to volunteer my time for testing whatever you need tested. I'm not a programmer, but I can follow instructions and provide constructive feedback (if that's qualification enough).

Regarding names... I have a few ideas:

The Faithless Feed
Community of the Godless
The Atheist Registrar
The Heathen Index
Directory of Doubt
Annals of Apostasy
Catalog of Unbelief

Feel free to play mix-and-match with any of these.

Thanks for dedicating so much time and effort, and don't hesitate to bug me if you have something you need done (as long as an idiot could do it).

PhillyChief said...

I probably have space on my server. Any thoughts on traffic?

What about simply calling it blogscrolling?

Steve Bowen said...

The Faithless Feed...

(on babies)