What is a blogroll?

A blogroll is a curated list of blogs that you read and want to recommend to others. It's a way of saying: “these are the writers I follow, and you might enjoy them too.”

A brief history

Blogrolls originated in the early 2000s during the golden age of personal blogging. Before social media algorithms decided what you should read, bloggers manually linked to each other in sidebars titled “Blogroll” or “Links I Like.” It was how people discovered new writers — through the recommendations of writers they already trusted.

As social media rose to dominance through the late 2000s and 2010s, blogrolls largely disappeared. Twitter and Facebook became the new discovery layer. But they brought algorithmic curation, outrage optimization, and the gradual erosion of the independent web.

Why blogrolls are making a comeback

A growing number of people are returning to RSS, personal sites, and direct subscriptions — the IndieWeb movement. Blogrolls are part of that revival. They're human-curated, algorithm-free, and they send readers directly to the source rather than through a platform.

A blogroll is also a statement of taste. It tells your readers who you think is worth reading, and it gives those writers traffic without requiring them to be on any particular platform.

What you can do with a blogroll

• Share it as a public page: your own curated reading list
• Embed it on your blog or personal site with a script tag
• Import and export it as OPML to use in any feed reader
• Help others discover independent writers and blogs
• Subscribe to an aggregated RSS feed of everything in your list

How to create a blogroll

The simplest approach is a text file or a sidebar on your site with links. But if you want something shareable, embeddable, and easy to maintain, that's what Miniroll is for.

With Miniroll you can build your blogroll in minutes, get a clean public URL, embed it anywhere, and import or export it as OPML. It's free to get started.