I have also been looking into archive page templates and assume that just as an archive can be incorporated into a widget or within a template, you have done the same thing with your ‘blogroll’, therefore when you add somebody new (seemingly weekly, if not daily) then your page automatically updates?
💬 Blogrolls in WordPress
Chris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)I’ve written up a bunch of details on how and what I did (as well as why), so hopefully it’ll give you a solid start including some custom code snippets and reasonably explicit directions to make some small improvements for those that may be a bit code-averse. Hint: I changed it from being a sidebar widget to making it a full page. Let us know if you need help making some of the small code related changes to get yourself sorted.
I have been wondering about your following page / blogroll lately. I looked into Colin Walker’s plugin, but really did not want to rewrite all my links.
I looked at Colin’s version too, but ran into some issues with it displaying almost EVERYTHING and needing to hand prune things down to a more manageable level.
My Following Page uses the Links Manager functionality, but instead of embedding the blogroll into a widget it allows me to use a shortcode to embed it into a page. So really it’s not an archive, but when I update with new links, the page runs the shortcode and updates it all (pending some page caching on the back end).
I do wish I had a browser bookmarklet that would allow me to click on a site I want to follow to parse the page and return all the relevant data automatically, but alas my javascript skills for attempting such a thing are rubbish.
I have always found the traditional ‘list’ blogroll as limited and cumbersome. That is why I developed my own template. When I find a new author I add it to my spreadsheet.
I like this in part, but also find the workflow a little annoying. I wish it were more integrated with my site. That is what interests me about Chris Aldrich’s work.