I started blogging regularly in September 2006, having spent the previous several months, first, wondering what this blogging thing was all about and why anyone would do it, and then, trying out various blogging platforms. I finally plumped for WordPress which by then was, as it still is, the most popular platform.

In those days, most “personal bloggers” (as I call ordinary individuals writing about their chosen topics as opposed to writers of commercial and “professional” blogs) wrote under a synonym. In this, we were wiser than we perhaps knew then, as later generations, who naively splashed their real names and personal information all over social media, were to discover to their cost.

Once I started blogging I quickly discovered the “blogging community”, numbers of personal bloggers like myself, laying their thoughts before the world and one another. In fact, it was the community that found me and I became aware of their attentions through the comments that they left on my blog. I of course returned the favour and the comments section of a blog post often turned into a virtual forum as visitors and blogger exchanged views.

On our blogs we each maintained a blogroll citing all the blogs we followed or found interesting. When we made the acquaintance of a new blogger, we would mine that person’s blogroll for interesting blogs to add to our own list. In that way, we expanded the blogging community to which we belonged.

There were also “blog directories”, websites that collected blogs and ordered them, together with basic information about them, in structured lists. Some included your blog for free while others required a subscription. Searching a directory was usually free. These were useful, especially if, like me, you were interested in blogs in other languages as well as in English. (Three of my favourite blogs were French-language blogs situated in Quebec and Montreal.)

So, where did it all go wrong? The rot set in gradually but the time came when nearly all of the blogs that I knew, in what I have come to see as the halcyon period of personal blogging, had ceased to exist. The natural slow evolutionary process of old blogs dying and new blogs springing up to take their place came to an end: blogs were dying faster than they were being replaced.

In a number of cases, but not all, once productive bloggers diverted into the easier, if more trivial, realms of Facebook and Twitter. It would be easy to say, misquoting the popular song, that “Social media killed the blogging star” – and some commentators have said it – but I suspect that the reasons are more complicated than that. Hypotheses abound: just type “history of blogging” into your search engine to see this.

What prompted me to write this, however, was not the desire to bore you with a history lesson but the fact that I think the pandemic has led to a small but welcome renaissance of personal blogging and that while this is pleasing to see, I am afraid that it will fade away again once the crisis is over. Is there some way to keep what we have gained?

That is not to say that the Web is now awash with personal blogs. It is certainly not. If, like me, you spend time and energy looking for good blogs, you have your work cut out. Those few directories that still exist contain mainly commecial blogs and their personal sections, where they even exist, are full of dead blogs. You can of course search the Web but how? What search string do you use? If you do locate a few personal blogs, 99% of them are dead, last updated years ago.

Don’t people still leave comments on my blog? Yes, sometimes. I am pleased and grateful when they do and I always reply. Other visitors pause long enough to click the “like” button. Whenever somebody leaves a comment on my blog or clicks “like”, I take a look to see whether they too have a blog. If they do and I like it, I add it to my blogroll. By various means, I have managed to garner 20 blogs for my blogroll. This is a “curated” list: I keep up with the blogs on it and if one has not published for a year, I delete it. I keep it in my RSS reader for a while longer, however, in case it wakes up again in which case I restore it to the blogroll.

Why do so few blogs these days have blogrolls? Is it because contemporary bloggers are self-obsessed people with write-only minds? Or is it because, having started only recently, and lacking interaction with other bloggers, the idea of a blogroll has never occurred to them? I am sure that at least some of them know of other blogs that they like and keep up with. So why not let the rest of us in on the secret?

I will therefore end this with a plea to present-day bloggers: if you do not have a blogroll on you blog, will you please consider adding one? All decent blogging platforms provide the blogroll as a built-in function and setting it up is easy. You can rename it whatever you like and it is a way of paying a compliment to blogs you find worthy. And who knows, if you add someone to your blogroll, they may very well add you to theirs! That is a benefit all of us can share.