Today we’re introducing a new feature: blog recommendations. This was inspired by recent interest in bringing back blogrolls, including posts from Dave Winer, his service FeedLand, the recommendations feature in Ghost, and feedback from Micro.blog users asking for new ways to discover people to follow. It’s a way to curate a list of favorite sites to link to from your blog.
Here’s a screenshot showing my current blogroll. I’m still adding people, but generally expect most blogrolls to be more limited than someone’s complete social following list.
To get started, click on Design → Edit Recommendations. By default, there is a single blogroll named “Recommendations”, but you can create additional blogrolls, for example to organize blogs in topics like “Favorite Authors” or “Technology”.
Your blogroll will be available in a few places within Micro.blog:
- Profile pages on the web will get a new “Recommended 5 blogs” link. This list can include any blog no matter where it’s hosted, and Micro.blog will attempt to link to the Micro.blog profile where possible for easy following.
- Hugo gets a new
blogrollshortcode. You can use this to include your recommendations on a web page. It’s provided by a plug-in that will be automatically installed if needed. - There’s also a plug-in for the Marfa and Alpine themes to show a blogroll in the sidebar on your home page. Check out my home page for an example. (Currently this is only visible for wide browser screens, not on mobile.)
- There’s data in Hugo for each blogroll, like
.Site.Data.blogrolls.recommendations, with anameandurl.
Like other features in Micro.blog, recommendations are built in an extensible way to give you control from Hugo themes, and with open file formats to connect with other platforms. Micro.blog manages updating OPML and JSON files. It also sends a webmention ping to the linked site when you add a recommendation, compatible with Ghost’s support for webmention.
I’ll be working on help pages with more examples for how this can be used. Happy blogging!
