Blogroll updated - at last!

(Please see UPDATES at end)

Since the blog-listing utility 'Blogrolling' closed some months back, I haven't had a proper public blogroll for the blogs I read which I select to list here. I don't like using the standard Blogger blogrolling utility (for various reasons I won't bore you with), so have instead created my own in a format which will be relatively easy to keep updated and which is readily exportable for other purposes (for example to appear in my other [Spanish] blog and in the links page of my main website).

Now I have done the work from A-B, but as this includes blogs which I classify as American, Australian, Belgian, Brazilian and British, that covers probably three-quarters of the blogs I read regularly. I'll get the rest of the blogs that I'm going to add to the list done in the next few days. You can see the blogs so far added in the right-column under the header "Blogs you may like".

As part of this exercise I have taken the opportunity to remove quite a large number of blogs both from my old bloglist and from the rss feeds I monitor, because many of the really brilliant blogs I once followed have, like the parrot in Monty Python, ceased to be, an inevitable result of having been blogging for nigh on nine years. However, I've also had the pleasure of reading a number of much more recently-started blogs and some of these are now in my blogroll, too.

By the way, and as I have written here a number of times before, I do not have a policy of reciprocity for my blogrolls - requests to include a link in my blogroll usually push that blog to the bottom of the list for inclusion, and I NEVER ask for my blog to be included in anyone else's blogroll list, although obviously I am grateful to those who have chosen to. In particular, those who ask me to place a link in my blogroll to their blog with the promise that they will in turn place a link to my blog in their blogroll will be sent away "with a flea in their ear" (to employ a Scottishism); attempting to increase the number of blogs which link to one's own blog by such base means cuts no ice with me (on the few occasions I've made an exception to this rule I have always come to regret it later - I'm far too polite to name names). On the other hand, when I do add a blog to my blogroll I often highlight the fact with a brief article here, specially if it is what I consider to be a particularly interesting blog.

UPDATE (Monday 14FEB2010 19.15 GMT) I've now added the blogroll from C-Z for my main blogroll. I'll be putting the blogroll for Spanish blogs in place shortly.

2nd UPDATE (Monday 14FEB2010 19.50 GMT) As always with this kind of exercise there have been a couple of errors [of omission], for inexplicable reasons. A couple have been corrected; there may be more, unfortunately.