It had been quite some time since I'd updated my blogroll, so I took care of that just now. In the process I also explored better ways to maintain it in order to avoid the staleness problem in the future.
I pursued two solutions, both of which were designed to integrate with Bloglines, which I currently use to read my RSS'd blog subscriptions. Not all blogs have RSS feeds, but there's few I read regularly that don't offer them. It's too big a pain, in my opinion, to have to separately remember and reload each separate blog. With RSS I can aggregate all the blogs I follow into one place and be notified when there's updated content to view - and often have that content brought to me in my reader as well. It's the only way that reading many blogs is manageable, and since I'm currently reading 70+ it's rare that I will take the trouble to read any that don't offer a feed.
The first solution was a blogroll plugin for MoveableType. I got it to work, but it wasn't as nice as I'd hoped. For one, it didn't import the descriptions of each blog I'd earlier laboriously typed into Bloglines for each blog link. For another, I didn't seem to be able to easily and efficiently sort the links as they displayed on my blogroll. Not that this was a show-stopper, but the links generally sit in Bloglines in alphabetical order, but once imported to my blog they displayed in reverse alphabetical order, for reasons I wasn't able to determine. More irksome, however, is that I don't think the link list can automatically refresh itself. I'm often adding and deleting blogs from my Bloglines reader, but I'd have to manually clear the links in my plugin and then re-import my Bloglines subscriptions to keep the blogroll updated, which isn't a huge improvement over the previous status quo that also was very manual. Furthermore, the plugin's import feature choked on a few subscriptions, so it ended up being fairly laborious on its own to delete the bothersome subscriptions from Bloglines, import everything, and then remember to reenter the offending subscription feed back into Bloglines.
After I wrestled around with all that I then noticed that Bloglines itself offers some code that can be put in a website to populate a list of links, and that's what I'm currently using to generate my blogroll. It, too, isn't perfect, mostly because it also doesn't include those descriptions I'd so laboriously typed in... But at least the list stays fresher, as I believe it will always produce a current snapshot of my Bloglines subscriptions.
At some point perhaps I'll categorize them into folders, which might serve reasonably in lieu of the wayward descriptions. Still, I don't understand why Bloglines even bothers to tempt me to enter them in if ultimately they serve no purpose.
In any case, the new and improved blogroll can still be found where the old one was, although at some point I may pull it out into a separate file, which I'd started to make when I was working with the plugin. Either way, just follow the link from the front page and you'll find it whereever I've put it.
Edit 5/6: Well, we currently have categories. Enjoy them while they last (and before I change my mind about them...)