Thornley Fallis and 76Design have released two plugins for the WordPress blogging platform today: TopLinks and FriendsRoll.
“TopLinks replaces the manually edited blogroll with a widget that automatically generates a list of the Blogs and sites that I most often link to. [...] FriendsRoll enables your readers to sign up to appear on your list of Friends. Any data they provide will stay with the blogger, not reside on some external site. So the relationship is directly between us.”
Joe Thornley, CEO, Thornley Fallis
I tried out TopLinks on my blog. It works well but I couldn’t get it to look right (yet). It doesn’t fit the way my sidebar is set up (1 custom column on top, and 2 widget-enabled columns on the bottom). Maybe I’ll find a way to customize it and reduce the width of the TopLinks box.
Not sure whether TopLinks really needs to be a replacement for the traditional blogroll. For my blog, I’d see it more as an addition.
Congrats to TF and 76Design for a great idea! if you have a WordPress blog, definitely check it out.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your review of our plugins. I think your point about getting the look and feel right is a good one. In future versions allowing the option to use the standard WordPress markup for sidebar widgets would be a good idea and would allow wider adoption of the plugins.
Thanks again for the feedback!