Thursday, April 22, 2010

Vague thought

SE London is gearing up for summer and the locals are spending more time outside shouting and screaming than in the last few (cold) months, and it takes a while every year for me to learn to sleep through it.  So, last night whilst waiting for everyone to push off home and cease their criminal ways so the sirens would stop, having rapidly run out of thankfulness for unemployment and not having to get up for work this morning - I started thinking about nice things like patchwork and blogs and wondered:

Is it possible/ desirable to have a list of the participant blogs in Block Lotto on the blog somewhere?  I'd really like to have a way of seeing what everyone does when they're not doing BL?  I know some people don't have blogs, but lots do.

I am thinking it could be difficult as people join and do or stop doing blocks randomly so we could end up with an huge list of non-BLers - I'm not keen on the idea if it means lots of extra work for Sophie though.  Maybe the list could be culled once a year if someone's not done BL for say 6 mths?

What does everyone think? And apologies if it's been discussed and rejected before I joined....

4 comments:

  1. Hi Goblinf,

    I've enjoyed going to other blogs when people (particularly Sophie) post links. They tend to be interesting and high quality. Do you mean just quilt/craft related blogs or all regularly visited blogs?

    Sorry to hear about your sleeping problems. I used to live on a major street in a college area. The warm weather was particularly bad because I needed windows open and they evidently needed to yell in front of my building.

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  2. its a little trickey, but if you click on anyone's (including yourself) profile you can see the blogs they write...on there you will see block lotto, and you will see all the author, I think it takes you to their profiles with a list of blogs...but it gets you there. I have spent many a late night feedings doing such!

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  3. My long-winded thoughts on your suggestions follow ... long story short, I believe the best approach is that when everyone is posting photos of their blocks, they should feel free to include a link to their blog. That gives everyone a chance to check out lotto block makers blogs and add them to their own blog list if they like what they see.

    The challenge of creating and MAINTAINING a published list of authors is that it is quite long and constantly changing. Right now there are 67 authors, but something less than half of the list are currently making blocks. I will soon be doing some housekeeping and remove authors that haven't made blocks in a long while–like I did in January–so that we don't run the risk of running out of spaces. While I could include the list of authors in one of the sidebars, it would make the page even longer–there is a maximum of 100 authors for a blog.

    I keep thinking about a blog list of those of us that have blogs and there's the same challenge of chasing a list that is constantly changing. I have a pretty good list of most of the Block Lotto bloggers (and I personally subscribe to their blogs), but, again, it's a constantly changing list (and I never get around to updating my subscriptions), so my personal list is the list of blogs of anyone who has EVER made lotto blocks.

    If I created the option for people to add their blogs (using Mr Linky or something similar), then I know that people who have NEVER made lotto blocks would be adding themselves. As it is now, there's at least one blogger who has been adding his blog to the bottom of posts as someone who has linked to us ... but they have never participated, blogged about anything related to the Block Lotto or lotto blocks and actually has NOT ever linked to us in a visible way. It's simply a rude way to try to generate traffic for another quilt blog that has no connection.

    This blog gets considerable visitors and I'm afraid some people would see that as an avenue to generate traffic for their own blogs–as I noted, that's already happening. If you participate in the lotto, it's more than fine to mention your blog here. But as far as blog lists go, I think that's an individual thing and everyone should maintain their own, either through the Follow Me option (in which blogger keeps track and associates the blogs with your account, or via one of the RSS readers like google reader.

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