It took me a couple of days, but I wrote my first plugin for Wordpress last week to fix the default way Wordpress displays your blogroll.

The default Links Widget in Wordpress works by pulling your entire blogroll into an unconfigurable list. This is fine if your blogroll only contains five or ten very descriptive links, but it doesn’t scale well if your blogroll contains a ton of obscurely named blogs. The longer the list gets, the less your readers will be able to see the individual links in it. The more obscure the link titles are, the less they’ll trust them.

If your readers don’t see a it, or they don’t trust it, they’re not going to click it.

So how do you fix that? The Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress does it by displaying a small, random subset of links from your blogroll that changes each time the page is refreshed. This should allow you to spread link love to your entire blogroll without overloading your reader’s eye. It also gives a description when the reader hovers the mouse over each link, and it puts the link’s category to its right so that readers don’t have to guess what they’re clicking on.

Better Blogroll gives the links in your blogroll more focus and more credibility.

Simple, right?

The widget can be found on the Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Take it for a spin and help your readers to get more out of your blogroll.

Posted in Blogging, DIY, Geeky