What better occasion than a charmingly rainy Spring Sunday afternoon to take care of a long due tidying-up of my blogroll (that list of blogs found under the Links tab above)…

In fact, it was mostly an occasion to crash on the couch, procrastinate all day and do some reading while nibbling on the relics of yesterday’s food orgy, but having accomplished one tangible task, no matter how trivial, gives me a faint sense of accomplishment and somewhat helps relieve the guilt.

First off, I finally ditched the “linkroll”, as you are all probably subscribed to the same dozen blogs I and everybody on the net goes to, to get their fix in “quirky” humorous pieces of web lore. Real links of interest will make it into posts of their own from now on. But anyway, I do suspect your first motive for visiting this blog is not to find the latest in kung-fu-fighting cat movies or dorky teenagers lip-syncing to cheesy eurodance.

I started adding a few of the newly discovered blogs that had been sitting in my aggregator for long enough and that I felt deserved sharing. For those wondering: my criteria for inclusion rest on a complex equation involving personal appreciation of blog content, frequency of updates, degree of closeness and chances of survival on the long term (tired of having to clean 3-month stillborn blogs off my list all the time). If you are not in there but think you should be, it may be an overlook, or I haven’t gotten around to (still in progress), or I simply don’t think the rest of the world should particularly care about your latest family daytrip to York. Which doesn’t mean I don’t: my personal list of feeds is literally a dozen times the size of the one above and I read all of them.

Then I struggled to remove some links in order to keep the length manageable. To an overwhelming majority, I just cleaned up broken links and clinically dead blogs (three months and no post usually means there is no point sending readers to your blog, no matter how great it used to be). I had to make a couple harder decisions regarding blogs that update very infrequently… There again, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them on my aggregator, but I know firsthand how frustrating it is to go through someone’s blogroll and get a string of ghost blogs that have obviously lost their maintainers’ attention…

I also dropped any attempt at keeping these lists ordered by “freshness” for now, as this meant relying either on blo.gs (whose “temporarily” disabled search hasn’t let me add a new link in months: good thing they do not belong to a major, err, search engine company) or the equally broken pingomatic.com‘s API. While limiting the list to the last X updated blogs was an elegant solution to uneven updating rates, its half-broken implementation was cause for many blogs in my list to stay hidden beneath the fold. Back to randomized order until I find the motivation to code this myself.

Anyway, I hope I didn’t forget anybody and I will be working on adding new links as they come…

The title of this post: 春風 (harukaze: spring wind), refers to the lovely spring breeze no doubt currently cleaning the Tokyo skies to a spotless blue as it does every year. As for here, sure we got winds, but they ain’t clearing any skies, let me tell you.