This weekend, I got back into programming.  I spent a good amount of Saturday working on a little project that I will describe here.  By the end of the day, I was both thrilled to have created a nice little script but feeling a bit sick, as though I had just eaten too much candy or fried chicken or watched too much TV.  Programming taps into the obsessive-compulsive/addictive part of my personality -- once I begin, I don't want to stop.

Although there's no end of programming that I want to dive into for building the Scholar's/Teacher's Box, I decided that I need to find something useful but relatively simple to work on that would ease me back into programming.   The project I found:  make it easier for me to edit my blogroll.

According to Jake Savin, "[b]logrolls are a collection of links on the home page of a weblog that point to sites that are somehow related to yours. They serve several purposes, they direct readers to the sites that are important to you, and serve as a set of bookmarks for you. They also help build page rank in search engines for sites you wish to bestow page rank on.

I have a blogroll -- but one which I maintained rather half-heartedly.  Sometime ago, I decided to put a blogroll in my blog, partly because everyone else was doing it on their blog, but also to point to sites I liked and finally to give more context to my own blog.  (By reading someone's blogroll, I get a pretty quick sense of where that blogger is coming from.  It's a bit like going to someone's house and looking at the bookshelves for books you recognize or don't recognize.)  The problem was that I didn't keep it up-to-date or make it very comprehensive.  (Some months ago,  friend asked me what I usually read to find the pieces of information that I found.  I said that I would update my blogroll to better reflect my sources.)  And one of the big reasons that I didn't keep my blogroll current was that it was too much of a pain to do on a regular basis.  That is, doing the update was just not part of my workflow and represented more work.

Not keeping a blogroll current is a reflection of a larger reference management/knowledge sharing problem.  A big part of what I do in my work is to keep track of many references, both URLs and more traditional bibliographic references.  However, they are to be found all over my digital universe:   in the history file and cache of my web browsers, among distilled lists in EccoPro, embedded in Microsoft Word files, emails, PDF files, my favorites, Endnote (which I use to manage bibliographic entries), a few BibTeX files, in my RSS aggregator that I run in Radio....It's a lot of work -- too much work -- to keep track of all these references, let alone to share them with others meaningfully.

So as a small step towards integrating my blogroll into the rest of my work, I have written a script that lets me download my blogroll into my EccoPro, my personal information manager, edit the blogroll in EccoPro, and then upload the blogroll back into Manila.  Why do that?  I do a lot of my work in EccoPro -- so it is still my favorite places to organize my thoughts.  Also, the Ecco outliner is much easier for me to use than Radio is. Finally, it is a start to letting my move references I already have in Ecco into my blogroll.

(As it turns out, the people who run blogrolling.com also the need for better blogroll maintenance before and are hosting a service to let people edit their blogrolls.  It's a good solution for many (since using it is probably simpler than editing one's own blogroll by hand) -- and you get the bonus of seeing what links are being blogrolled by others.  However, that won't work for me because I want to work on my references in an integrated way.  Having to go to blogrolling.com -- or even to use their bookmarklet -- doesn't help me integrate all my referencing activity.)

Some possible next steps for me.  I want to start integrating my blogroll into other ways that I do work.  For example, the list of sites I have on my RSS aggregator is different from my blogroll, which in turn, is different from a set of "daily visit" links I have set up in Mozilla.  I've become a big fan of tabbed browsing (because through one click, I can load up a set of pages simultaneously).  Another idea is to write a program that looks at my history and makes it easier for me to identify the sites that I do visit often and suggest those sites to be added to my blogroll.

I'm sure others have worked on this issue before -- but it's been fun to think about them for myself.