My annual Boxing Day blogroll cleanup tradition

✯ Day 360 of Vintage 365 ✯

Stuffed to the gills with immensely delicious food, giddy from the past day’s merriment, and relaxed by the fact that for many of us today means a day free from our jobs, it might seem a tad odd that I have a Boxing Day tradition that pertains to cleaning.

Lest you think I'm getting an especially early jump on my spring cleaning, allow me to explain. You see, once a year I like to go through the blog roll here on Chronically Vintage and tidy things up, removing any sites that no longer exist (shut down by their authors), which have switched to "by invite only" status, or that are no longer good matches for this site.

Having been awake for hours already, I've completed the blog tidying process for this year. It's always deeply interesting to see which blogs are still going strong and which, for whatever reason, have decided to shut down or have become abandoned (by which I mean their owners suddenly stopped blogging and did not create a post saying that they were planning to do such).

{Nothing as arduous as scrubbing the stove for me today, just doing a little light online housekeeping this fine, frosty Boxing Day. Vintage Kleenoff Jelly ad via alsis35 on Flickr.}

In the case of the later, I generally have a one year rule, by which I mean if a given blog has not seen any new activity for a year or longer, I'm more inclined to remove it from my blog roll. However, even there one encounters exceptions, because (given the historically geared nature of the topics many vintage loving bloggers cover) the content on such sites may still be of great interest to fellow vintage fans and I wouldn't want anyone to miss out on a great site simply because it's no longer going strong.

Though I do not count the precise number of links that I remove each year, I'd ballpark things and say that this time around my blog roll was shortened by about 20%. As I add new links to it throughout the year however, there's a very decent chance that come Boxing Day 2012, it will once again be much the same size as it was prior to this morning.

In fact, in briefly visiting every single blog on listing in my sidebar today, I discovered (through posts on various sites) three or four new (to me) vintage blogs, which of course I added to the roster.

One might wonder why I opted to assign Boxing Day to this yearly task and the I believe that the first time around it was something that just came about originally. Back then, in December 2009, Chronically Vintage had been online for the better part of a year and I figured it was time I pruned by blog roll (as described above) to make sure it was in peak shape for my wonderful blog visitors to enjoy.

As way of ensuring this job was carried out annual, it made sense from there on out to stick with the same day each year, and thus my annual Boxing Day tradition of tidying up my blogroll was born.

That, however, is just about the only "job" I'll be doing today. There's too many scrumptious Christmas leftovers to eat, vintage holiday songs to enjoy, and new presents to delight in to devote this marvelous day of relaxation to anything more arduous than that.

Wishing you all a terrifically fun Boxing Day, however you opt to spend it, sweet dears!