changing the blogroll

Does anyone even still read my journal by coming directly to LiveJournal? I have no idea. And annoyingly, without any announcement or explanation that I saw, LiveJournal changed something about how they measure visitors, because in the middle of June my statistics for "all visitors" suddenly dropped from an average somewhere between 30 to 50 a day to maybe 5 a day. I have no idea whether that means the count was inflated before the change or the count is now under-reported.

Anyhow, I bring all that up because on LiveJournal, my page has a sidebar. And one of the sidebar elements is a set of links to other sites, primarily other personal blogs I read regularly (and consider those people friends, although in a few cases I've barely met the authors in real life, if ever). Well, I've been thinking for quite a while that I ought to update that sidebar; some of the blogs no longer update or no longer even exist, while other blogs that I do read regularly aren't in the list.

I'm dropping the link to "my MySpace music-only blog", because I stopped cross-posting my concert reviews back in 2009 when I also stopped writing them regularly, and now that I'm back to writing them, MySpace is increasingly irrelevant.

For friends' blogs, I'm dropping a few:

• I'm changing the link for bluishorange to Alison's Tumblr site, which she updates regularly. But I'll keep checking the classic bluishorange periodically, hoping for new posts, because she's a great writer.
• Electrolicious because I never bothered to register when Ariel made it semi-private and so I stopped reading it. However, I'd bet it's still worth reading if you want to check it out; she hasn't stopped being smart and sassy, I'm sure.
• FishSuit by Scott Dierdorf is defunct, which is very very sad.
• Elizabeth's Geek's Guide to Getting the Girl is still up and worth a read, but she completed the series and is no longer updating.

A couple I'm going to keep despite myself:

• Annie has been very sporadic about updating This Is Annie, but she does still occasionally make new posts, and I'm always happy when she does.
• Zannah likewise no longer really updates vox.machina; in fact, I stopped checking for months, and only recently discovered that she'd apparently gone through a revival at the start of this year, only to break off again in late March. But Zannah's directly responsible for me having a LiveJournal, so I'll keep a link up for her (and hope she gets back to writing again).

And for the record, the other links I'm keeping in the list are:

• Linda's All & Sundry, which updates less frequently than it used to and more often has posts that are largely photos, but man, she knows how to write.
• John likewise posts sporadically at The Mighty Atom, but as a great designer of both tabletop games and graphic arts (as well as my friend), it's always something interesting.
• Farida's Saints & Spinners is another one that could go under "keeping despite myself" because honestly I rarely read it—sorry, Farida—but she does post somewhat regularly about storytelling, the felt dolls she creates and sells on Etsy, and life in general, and I do recommend checking it out. (And like everyone else in my blogroll, she writes well.)
• And the "year" of Tony's Year of the Dungeon is now over, but he does still occasionally post updates and new artwork.

Rather than add a bunch of new links and make this post even longer, I'll save the list of new blogs for tomorrow.