I have never liked the idea of blogrolls: they seemed too much like logrolling, ie, dropping names or linking to folks without reading them. Much better to extract the sites you read from your aggregator for two reasons: 1. it’s accurate, 2, it’s automatic, or as close as possible to it.
To that end, I found the very useful MTOutliner plugin and after working with its inventor, we got it working. Some impedance mismatch on carriage returns and linefeeds, of all things.
You can see it all in the bottom of the left sidebar.
I also added some more explicit references to the feeds (the links go to the home page of the site and to the feed). Those RSS 2.0 buttons aren’t buttons at all: they’re CSS-styled text, so they’re indexable by crawlers/robots and they’re easily changed.
I just wrap them in a span tag:
<span class="xmlbtn">RSS 2.0</span>
with this style applied.
.xmlbtn {
border:1px solid;
border-color:#FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
padding:0 3px;
font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
color:#FFF;
background:#F60;
text-decoration:none;
margin:0;
text-align: right;
}