Cleaning House or Gordon Doesn't Live There Any More

One of the best features Blogger has to offer is its real-time updating Blogroll. Find a blog you like, slap the address in the widgit and presto! Every time that blog updates the link refreshes and floats to the top of the list.

It has its idiosyncracies. If Syp ever wondered why I post on his blog and quote and link to him here and yet he doesn't feature in the blogroll, it's because I've added Bio Break a number of times and it magically vanishes. I just added him yet again - maybe it'll stick this time. Not that he needs the traffic...

Then there's Scree's The Cynic Dialogues . Blogger allows that to stay on the list but will have no truck with updates, so it sits stubbornly right down at the very bottom where, presumably, no one ever looks because, well, it's a very long list. Even with the epic-length posts I churn out, the blog roll often descends well beyond the start of the previous rant and whether anyone ever gets as far as "Previously on Inventory Full" I sometimes wonder.

It's been almost a year and a half since I last culled the roll. Back then in January 2013 I was pretty aggressive about it, rooting anyone who hadn't spoken up for themselves in the previous three months. Of the seven sites that were dropped back then a few did post again, sporadically, but all are dormant now as far as I can tell. Darren who used to be The CommonSense Gamer morphed into CatholicGamer for a while, which in turn seems to have vanished into the great blogging beyond.

Even so, three months was certainly too short to tell whether the signal was really down. This time I'm raising the bar to one year, give or take a couple of weeks. Any blog that hasn't let out a peep since August 2013 is out.

The list includes a couple of Big Names, which reminds me of a term that was common currency in comics fandom back in the 80s and which I believe derives originally from science fiction fandom - BNF or Big Name Fan. I'm not sure MMO blogging has the same hierarchical structure but if it does then both Spinks of Welcome to Spinksville and Gordon of We Fly Spitfires would qualify.

Both blogs are still up, if inactive, and Spinks pops up on comment threads occasionally. They could rumble into life any day and I hope they do. Until that day, however, I am retiring them from the list of Places We Go along with the following :

Kichwas
Stylish Corpse
In Character
The Egg Baron
Get The Girl, Kill The Baddies
Braving The Elementalist (which became Chainmaildress, also now defunct)
Noob Raider
Trippin Tyria

Do you think? Could it be...?

I'd love to see any or all of them judder back to life like a re-animated corpse...erm, possibly not the best of similes... but the one I'd be most excited to welcome back from limbo would be The Egg Baron. So much fuel in GW2 now for the kind of Lore detective work in which he excelled.

If there are any miraculous revivals I should know about them because all of the above are safely ensconced in my Feedly feed. If any begin to show signs of life they shall be restored.

Wilhelm pointed out in the comments last time that removing old blogs and adding new ones to a blogroll is just part of the job and I wholeheartedly agree. I tend to be a lot better at adding them then taking them away. New ones trickle in unannounced all the time, which is why there's no list of new additions this go round.

I'd like to say that I'll keep on top of this and remove inactives on a rolling 12-month guillotine. That's my intention and if I manage it then from now on silent blogs will simply vanish from the list unanounced. Chances are I'll probably forget all about it, though, and there'll be another post of this nature along in a year or so. Until then, happy blogging!