One of the things I always envied the blogspot bloggers for was their live updating blogroll. You know, with blogs ordered by their last post. In the spirit of “this blog runs on my own site, wordpress is open and extensible software, there should be a solution for it” I invested a bit of time and now found a nice plugin called WP Social Blogroll that seems to do the job. You’ll find it to the right as “Experimental Live Blogroll”.

It basically relies on the Google API to get the information, so it should be as up-to-date as the blogger rolls. There’s a few minor differences, for example, the current version doesn’t calculate the post age down to the minute, but I should be able to change that in the code if I want to. I’m also not 100% sure I liked the current style, but I could always play around with the CSS more.

I know many other people have been searching for such a feature. If you want any information, just ask. I’m not sure it’ll work with wordpress.com-hosted blogs, but it might be worth a try for those over there.

I also need your feedback, though: The plugin comes with a warning that blog pages can take longer to load if the blogroll is “large”, but it doesn’t give a number. Please leave a note if you have the feeling that the site has become sluggish with the new plugin. It’s normal that the blogroll takes a second to populate after the site was loaded, and I think that’s fine as long as the rest of the page is rendered without much delay.