After pointing Buck Daruma to ways to do blogrolls, I decided to test-drive MTBlogroll.

This is a MovableType plugin by Arvind Satyanarayanthat will manage a blogroll locally in your MovableType mySQL database, instead of keeping it on someone else’s web site like BlogRolling.

The advantage is clear; faster, since it’s local, and you don’t depend on an external site to be up. It also have a number of features I like, one of which is that it can import my existing blogrolls. And of course, i have much more control over it.

It was easy to install and easy to configure, though the docs are minimalist at best and the template changes caused me some confusion.

There are a few downsides though — the main one being that it evidently can’t do ‘recently updated’. Now, for a roll of static links, that’s fine. Particularly for things like non-blog links. I don’t care when they’re updated. But for things like my Daily Reads list, I depend on that (so it’s annoying when blogs don’t ping the right sites to make this work).

In short I’d say that this works really well aside from that feature; I’ll be switching my Daily Reads back to blogrolling, but I may put my static non-blog links into my local roll since I don’t often update that.

For sites I host, it’s up and ready and working, all you need is a template hack and to load in your blogroll; mail me and I’ll show you how or do it for you.