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Randy Elrod (of Ethos) is an inspiration to me and countless others. I came up with the idea for a blogroll as a way to say thanks to Randy for sharing his vision of the importance of blogging. Randy began a mentoring group at Merridees in Franklin, TN long before I came to town. He welcomed me into the circle with guys like Mark Lee, Chad Jarnagin, Jeremy Thiessen, and several others. During the winter of 2004-2005, Randy got the blog bug from Mark Lee, a long time blogger. Since then, he's encouraged many in our group who have since started our own blogs. And from Randy's talks at seminars, conferences, and Peoples Church services, many of you have also been inspired to begin blogging.

Why a blogroll? Blogrolls help to provide visibility to popular as well as soon to be popular blogs by sharing some commonalities and by introducing friends of friends. Having others linked to you is a great way to improve your rankings within technorati and google. The promotion of the "tail", as Hugh Hewitt discusses in his book "Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World" (a great read by the way), is an added benefit as well.

If you have been impacted by Randy and would like to be included in the blog roll, send me an email at theron [at] theronhatch.com (personal anti-spam robot protection: you'll want to replace the [at] with @). Include your Name, Blog URL, a brief narrative of your brush with fame (I mean Randy), and why you blog. Make sure its clean because I may end up using it as a promotional tool.

Here is the current list:

When adding this to your site, please include Randy Elrod Inspired as the blogroll name.

Method #1: Insert the following Javascript code into your blog template. This will probably be the most common method used. For Typepad, create a Notes TypeList and add a new item in the TypeList. Copy and paste the code into the Notes field of the TypeList item and save. For Wordpress and Blogger, you are on your own. Sorry!

Method #2: If you use PHP or another method to include raw HTML into your blog, use the following URL instead, which returns the blogroll as HTML.

If you are the kind that likes to mess with CSS, you can customize the appearance of your blogroll. The blogroll has two [div] tags, which let you change the appearance of folder titles and subscriptions. The entire blogroll is enclosed with a [div] tag that has a class='blogrollmain' attribute. In addition, folders have [div] tags with a class='blogrollfolder' attribute.

If you have any issues getting this working, shoot me an email at the address above and I'll see if I can help.