we've got a brand new link on the left that i'm really excited about. it's the equivalent of an lj friends page, only my clever fella made it especially for me out of stuff we found lying around on the internet*, isn't he clever? :D

i don't like huge long blogrolls (and i particularly hate that word), although i appreciate the desire to link back to people who inspire you. i just don't find them particularly useful as a visitor. occasionally i will pick a random link from a sidebar to follow, perhaps a name i've seen in a couple of different places, but in general i don't find them a good way of finding new blogs. i do like friends pages though - i love having the chance to browse through posts at random until i find one that interests me enough to check out the blog. browsing content rather than titles works for me.

so after much swearing and googling we've got a whole page devoted to my daily reads but it may need a bit of tweaking. i've set the options to display the 20 most recent posts from all the blogs i subscribe to (listed at right, apols for css alignment nightmare, is on the list), and i've chosen to display full posts rather than excerpts.

i would really appreciate some feedback on this - is the page taking too long to load? should i have fewer posts? would excerpts work better and do the same job of giving people a chance to browse and find fantastic blogs they may have missed?

*to be fair, it's a wordpress plugin called friends rss aggregator, but it's not the most straightforward thing in the world to install, and i'm a hard task mistress, so it doesn't make him any less clever