Fred Wilson is changing his blog reading habits. He has just switched to a feed reader and now looking for a tool to publish the list of blogs that he reads arranged in categories [like the screenshot on your left]When I add a blog to NetNewsWire, it will end up on the blogroll. I'd really like to organize the blogs/feeds by my seven categories, but I don't know how to do that in Newsgator yet. When/if I figure that out, you'll see the categories appear on my blogroll.Here are two possible solutions. The first approach would generate a
In either of these methods, you would need to specify your OPML feed URL [public] which is generally exposed by almost all web based feed readers. Now let's look at the actual methods:
Method 1: Grazr - Accepts URL of a blog feed or an OPML file. Feeds may be in RSS, RDF, or Atom formats. With Grazr, you have to specify the OPML file url and the dimensions [width, height] of the grazr window that would be placed in your blog layout. Here's a real example with CNet Top 100 Blogs.
Method 2: Optimal browser - Specify the OPML feed address and Optimal browser generates a very neat HTML based blogroll arranged in categories. You can use the Optimal Brower Widget to generate code for inserting the blogroll as an IFRAME in your blog. Click for a real example.
Both Grazr and Optimal Browser provide a small code snippet to insert in your blog template.
While both the services are fast and quick to install, it really depends on what kind of experience you would like to provide to your site visitors and whether you would like to help your blogroll partners with some Google Juice.
Grazr feed reader has a modern interface and your visitors get to customize the style of your blogroll in either Slider or Outline format. Optimal Browser has a standard HTML tree interface Iayout which cannot be customized by the visitors but may help in improving the search engine rankings of your blog friends as it is plain HTML which will be picked by search spiders who generally don't parse Javascript.
