**UPDATE** 1/21/11 I had to disable RSS Blogroll.  Last night I got a call from my webhost that my site was under attack.  At least 200 ports were opened at the same time pinging away at my site.  We both were investigating seeing if it was a bot or if it was a plugin or if by chance I had unintentionally ticked someone off.  They got into the backend of my blog and started checking the plugins.  When they turned off RSS Blogroll the attack stopped.  I left a message for the plugin author hoping he has a fix to it, but for now I do not have this one activated on my blog.

I was adding some RSS feeds to my blogroll today and thought, you know I really like this WordPress Plugin. It’s probably one of the ones I use most often. It’s RSS Blogroll. You can see it in action at the top of my sidebar to the right. It’s under blog stalking.

From the Plugin Creator -

I don’t really like Blogrolls, I think they’re often not much more than glorified link dumps. I don’t like how they give you nothing more than the Blog title, and unless that title really grabs your attention, you’re never gonna click it. I don’t like how they are often just a static list, commonly out of date, that you learn to ignore after the first 4 page views. In their current format, they just appear to be a great waste of space.

This is why I decided to create the RSS Blogroll plugin. RSS Blogroll allows you to link to your favourite blogs via the latest items from their RSS/Atom feed. Article titles are much more attention grabbing and will deliver much higher quality traffic. We all hate clicking through to abandoned blogs – displaying article publication dates also lets readers know these are up to date and active sites.

Many of us want to direct some of our traffic to related sites. RSS Blogroll will create deeplinks to the target sites, which are much more useful for SEO than homepage links. Overall it’s a win-win situation with a better browsing experience for users and the linked sites getting more visitors who are actually interested in their content.

When I installed RSS Blogroll plugin, I was searching for something to make my link list shorter.  I have a lot of blogs that I love but it was taking over my sidebar.  I use those links those to visit the blogs that I read.  Going through that whole list could take a long time.

This plugin saves me in 2 ways – I set the number of feeds I want to display and I can see the blogs that I read which have been updated recently.  I can make it as long of a list or as short of a list as I want.  I can add more info or I can keep it decluttered with just the title.  I can set how often I want it to check for new blog posts.  Love it!

See, I keep it simple for my sidebar since my columns aren’t that wide and I don’t want it to be a huge mess of links.

I had been using collapsable link plugins before and those were great except that they had certain settings I couldn’t change, my list was still long, etc etc etc.  This has worked perfectly for me for quite awhile now.

I just thought I’d pass along that tip in case anyone had out of control sidebars like I did before.

Check out RSS Blogroll WordPress Plugin.

Have a great day!

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