I don't use 88x31 buttons but I do maintain an old-fashioned blogroll on my personal website: https://susam.net/roll.html

I follow the same set of websites with my feed reader too. There is an OPML file at the end of that page that I use with my feed reader. I keep the list intentionally small so that I can realistically read every post that appears on these websites on a regular basis.

Although I usually read new posts in my feed reader, I still visit each website on the list at least, roughly, once a month, just to see these personal sites in their full glory. These are blogs I have been following for years, in fact some of them for a couple of decades now! So when a new post appears on one of these websites, I make time to read it. It is one of the joys of browsing the Web that I have cherished ever since I first got online on the information superhighway.

Keeping the list small also makes it easy for me to notice when a website goes defunct. Over all these years a few websites did indeed sadly disappear, which I then removed from my list.