Before the algorithms, there was the blogroll. It was a simple list of links directing visitors–gasp–away from your site, to other sites you enjoy.

Blogrolls showed up almost as soon as blogging did, sometime around 1999 or 2000. They were partly a practical way to keep track of your favorite sites before RSS readers, and partly social. Linking to someone’s blog was an acknowledgment, and a suggestion of other people to read on what was then a pretty small internet.

Movable Type had blogroll support built in. So did most of the other tools of that era. For a while, there were even dedicated services that let you manage your blogroll centrally and embed it anywhere. It was a whole thing.

Then Facebook happened, and then Twitter, and the blogroll quietly disappeared. Why maintain a list of sites when social media feeds would surface everything for you? Except, of course, the feeds surfaced what they wanted to surface, which turned out to be a different thing entirely.

You’ll find some of the sites I like over in the sidebar below the recent posts. Out with the algorithm, in with the blogroll.