Tenderfoot Diaries

When I contemplated starting this blog I was immediately confronted with a king size dilemma.  It wasn’t what to write about or how the blog should look or what it should be called.  Those were relatively easy decisions.  My big dilemma, one that I have not entirely solved, involved this blogroll, or at least the version of it that should end up on this blog.

For those of you who haven’t taken a look at it lately, the OBS blogroll is huge.  It now numbers somewhere in the neighborhood of 210 blogs, and I’m proud to have each and every one of them on that blogroll.  I’m also aware that a lot of people on that blogroll feel a connection to me because I lead an organization that they support.  So, when I started putting together my personal blog, one question that confronted me was this, how does that blogroll there connect to the blogroll here?

For a while I thought about just transferring the whole thing over.  That seemed the simplest way, at least from the perspective of sparing hurt feelings and making sure no one felt left out.  The only problem with that solution is that I’d then be managing two blogrolls with over 200 blogs on them, and managing one of that size is quite enough.

Also, if I’m being honest, moving the whole blogroll didn’t feel quite right.  On the OBS blog I’m a public persona of a sort, and the blogs on that blogroll are connected to the organization, not to me personally.  Here, however, I’m just me, and I wanted my blogroll to be full of blogs that had a connection to me, either because they were written by friends, or because they were blogs that had some personal meaning to me.

I’m not sure I’ve entirely decided how I want to solve this issue.  I could easily see the blogroll on this blog getting out of control, since there are a lot of outdoor bloggers I consider friends and a lot of outdoor blogs I enjoy reading and admire.  It may be that I decide to limit the blogroll to 20 or so blogs and switch it out every month or so.  It may be that the blogroll just grows and grows.  I don’t know exactly how I’ll solve this dilemma.  What I do know is that I believe that having a blogroll is important, and that I want to support the outdoor bloggers whom I admire and who are my friends.

If anyone has any suggestions for how I can accomplish those goals, please share them.  If you think I’m making a tempest in a teapot and worrying over nothing, tell me that too.  Sometimes that’s helpful to hear.