Blog tools: search your own blogroll with Rollyo

I try to link back to the blog posts of other Des Moines area bloggers as often as I can. One of the ways I decide whom to link to from a particular post is this: I determine a topic I want to write about, then I do a Google search to see who else is talking about that topic. Problem is, of course, Google gives me links to bloggers from around the world – and I want to specifically link to local bloggers as often as I can. So, what I needed was a tool that could do a Google-style search only on Des Moines area blogs.

It didn’t take long before I found what seems to be a tool for doing just that: it’s called Rollyo, and it allows me to create my own custom search list by entering the URL’s of up to 25 selected blogs. So, I spent a little time creating a few of my own “searchrolls,” and now I can search for occurances of my selected phrase just within the blogs I’ve specified. This tells me if anyone else locally is blogging about the topic I’m covering, and helps me quickly uncover a post I might be able to link back to.

Only two faults I’ve found so far: first, the limit of 25 URL’s. I ought to be able to enter as many URL’s as I want to in a single searchroll. And second, I can only search one of my custom searchrolls at a time. It took me four separate rolls (25 URL’s in each) to enter all my local site links, so I have to do four separate searches. That’s still better than searching the entire Internet for a link to a local blog, but I’d like to be able to check multiple searchrolls with one click.