Blogs 'n badges

If you know anything about me, it’s that I’m on top of all the latest trends on the information superhighway.

Remember blogrolls? Turns out they’re back, and backer than ever.

I’ve started collecting a few links over here, and I’ve created my own 88x31 badge for the occasion:

Isn’t that neat. Use it as you see fit!

Making a badge & listing those of others, I did wonder about a finer point (and a new one, to me) of netiquette. Do you embed someone else’s image URL directly from their website? This would let them update their badge at will (I’ll likely do so myself), and have that propagate to any site that’s featuring it.

However, that does mean that my own page might be slower to render, given that it has to fetch from a number of third-party servers; and likewise, it means that I’m exerting some load pressure (however minimal) on those other sites. There’s also the potential for mischievous or malicious action; I could change my badge to read “BUTTS” and visitors seeing that on the front page of cnn dot com would be ashamed of their words & deeds. Also link rot is real.

For now, I’m just going to download & host people’s badges myself, & do the occasional scan to make sure everything’s still relevant.

Anyway, if you have thoughts, or know of an ISO standard for hosting & posting badges, or would like to feature mine on yours or yours on mine, let me know!