Making a "blogroll" easier with Bblogger gadget

Bloggers often feature a list of their favorite blogs, called a “blogroll,” in the sidebar of their own blog. And  the Blog List gadget will help you make it more powerful and useful, also mixed it in with your favorite blogs in Google Reader.

At its most basic, Blog List displays a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon. If you link to a blog with an Atom or RSS feed, however, the Blog List can show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post.

You can set the number of blogs to show in the list and whether they should be sorted by update time or alphabetically by blog title.

You add blogs to your Blog List by entering blog or feed URLs directly, or by importing subscriptions from Google Reader. When you add by URL, Blogger will attempt to detect an Atom or RSS feed for it in order to show post and update information. If none is found, the blog will still be added to the Blog List, just as a simple link.

To add a Blog List (Or two! Or more!) to your blog, just choose Blog List gadget from Design | Page Elements | Add a Gadget

Notes

• The Blog List writes all links out in HTML so that, unlike JavaScript-based blogrolls, you pass PageRank goodness on to the blogs you link to.
• The icon next to a feed is taken from the favicon.ico file in the blog’s home directory. Blogger currently does not support the “shortcut icon” link tag.
• Some blogs don’t link to their Atom and RSS feeds in a way that Blogger can detect. In these cases, add the feed URL to the Blog List for best results.
• Only the blog admin who added the Blog List may edit and configure it.