I have been busy removing some "dead" wood from the site, randomly checking through the blogs, and deleting any sites
that are no longer there, quite a few removed. I will continue to do so, so there is less chance of you finding something interesting, then visiting a dead link.

Lots of new categories have been added to the directory, and I have moved lots of blogs into these categories, where they match the category.

ALthough I try to accept sites within a day, sometimes it takes a little longer, as I like to wait until the pages have had a little exposure (so they can get a chance at being picked up by search engine spiders). This being the case, I hang on to submissions for a little while to allow this to happen. The backlog is low at the moment, as the system is quite efficient for accepting the blogs, a lot of it is automated (screenshots, post archiving etc).

Have not had any sales of the hosting yet, fingers crossed I will get some before long, otherwise it was a waste of money signing up
as a reseller. Live and learn I guess :)

Submissions are still coming in at a fairly steady rate though, so it looks like there is going to be even more content in the future :)

The vast majority of sites that get rejected are not blogs, just company pages spamming a blog directory. Why they bother I dont
know, as its a waste of their time, and just makes me make a mental note never to use that company EVER....

One such example, which I rejected instanly was from a company selling military equipment, with a name starting with "swastica".
No one can be so stupid as to forget what the swastica is associated with, especially in the military - so they went in the reject bin where the deserve to stay.

Submitted to a few more sites today, hopefully more links will bring in more traffic. The more blogs people submit the better!

I could get the blogs automatically, but then it would be a directory full of random blogs, its much better when people submit
a blog, as it means they care enough about their blog, or blog site to try and promote it. Plus they can choose the category, and
the keywords, rather than me just guessing or automating it.

I have added a paypal donate button on the more details page of each blog, if anyone out there has any spare change in their
paypal account and feel like donating, it would be appreciated! I am running this site out of my own pocket, no investors, or
vulture capatalist are funding me. So if you feel like a generous act, you know what to do! I will be able to use any donations to
fund the hosting and running costs, and maybe even treat myself now and again :)

The way I figure it, a optional, no pressure donation button is better than charging for listings, which i believe should be free, so everyone has a chance to get listed - rich or poor.

I have also started a new scheme (not running yet, just collecting data) in which I will be keeping track of which sites update
on a regular basis, this way you will be able to see "fresh" content a lot easier. I will track the data for a while to see how it goes, and whilst doing that, I will be able to write the front end for it.

Hopefully it should help to make the site a lot more useful.

Thats all for now, been up all night so better get some sleep!

Updated the database so all blogspot blogs that are listed should now have their feeds read automatically.

I read the feeds at least once a day (often more often) and the results are shown both on the "more details" page
for a blog, and in the search results. This means that searches on LS BLogs contain information from bloggers that
is VERY upto date. Wnat opinions on what is being blogged about today? Its on LS BLogs, try the search and see what I mean.

The email problem has sorted itself out, for a while I had to use the second server to handle the emails, but its back to normal now.

Strange thing is I have no idea what the problem was, and as It fixed itself, guess I may never know. Computers eh, love em or hate em, they sure have a mind of their own sometimes!

Would just like to take a moment to thank MrSapo for including LS Blogs in its blog section!

For those that have not heard of it, here is its description - and i qoute -

" What is MrSAPO? It's a web search tool, from where you can type in your search terms once, and then access the original results of the world's top search engines just by clicking their buttons."

Cool, ls blogs is now one of the worlds top search engines eh :) (that tickled me!)

The site has received good press from many sites, including lockergnome, webpronews, USA today, and more. Hopefully
this will mean more people using lsblogs, which will mean more content for you to use.


MrSapo

Well, we have over 2000 blogs now, and growing fast!

Thanks to everyone for the submissions, the links, and the write ups!

We are also used in some good blog submission sites, and search sites, more on this in a future post (when I am not this tired!)

There is a known problem with the submission, the email facility has oddly failed, I am looking into it when I get spare time,
hopefully it wont be long before its fixed, but for now, dont worry if you dont get emails to confirm you are listed. I would just recommend checking back in a day or 2 to search to see if you are in.

Little bit confused as to why I am seeing a article all over the net saying I am one of the sites that REQUIRES a link back,
as I have never stated that, sure a link back is brilliant, but I have never forced one, so the sites that have posted that have
their facts wrong. Cant seem to leave any comments on their site either to correct them.. Weird.

Now you can purchase hosting, domains, and much more from LS Blogs.

Good prices, plans to suit different needs, now you have no excuse for not having your own domain :)

Plus all sales will help to support the running of ls blogs, go on, take a look, even better take the plunge
and get yourself a domain and a hosting plan.

LS Blogs Hosting and Domains...

Wow, so many blogs have been submitted I have a huge backlog to sort out!

Apologies for the delay, I was not updating/accepting blogs for a while, what with Christmas, then flu, then a ear infection
which left me deaf in one ear for a fortnight. But things are getting back on track, and I have managed to clear a few hundred of them, but many hundreds more left, so I am going to be busy for a while...

The site now has a google page rank of 5 on the main page, and the number of blogs has shot up quite dramatically.

Lots of blogs rejected, mainly because they were NOT blogs, just adverts for a site, or in some cases actuall business sites which
had nothing to do with blogs or blogging at all...

Thats all for now,

more news later

Been having a few little problems with one of the hosts used in production of this site (this site is put together on more than one server).

The hosts that I use for the feed reading seemed to have some problems, and moved to a upgraded server, this of course meant some downtime (not for lsblogs, just for the updating of feeds).

Now that things are settling down, feeds are being updated as before, and I will make a move on fixing the XML ping side of things soon (again, problem on hosts server...)

Lots of new submissions recently, including some from the UK press (coool, hope they mention the site in the magazines, that would be great (hint hint))

LS Blogs has also been added to the top 55 RSS list ,currently at the lower end, but hey at least its in there :) which is great,
and a nice little boost to keep things ticking over nicely.

Still have plenty room for improvement, loads of new features coming sometime (basically when I write them :), but as christmas is coming up, I may do a little Chrismasy feel for LS Blogs, in addition to saving up for Christmas presents! The good thing is, I only really need to do it once, as I can just "turn off" the seasonal look until christmas comes around each year, so its worth doing. Plus its about time I stopped adding content, and useful features, and just had a little fun trying to make the site look a little nicer.

Of course, graphic design is not my strong point, so I can promise any works of art :) but hey, its free!

Noticed a couple of comments from people saying there are too many ads, and not enough content.

There are quite a few ads, and I suppose I could drop a few of them, but they do help towards the cost of hosting (which comes out of my own pockets, which are usually empty to start with!). There is content, actually there is a lot of content, not just title/description, but screenshot AND excerpts from the blogs previous / recent posts. Searchable too, so content is present, I just think people are not seeing it, and dont realise its there.

I probably need to make the sites features stand out more, but the more I do, the more people may find it confusing, so its a fine line to draw.

First of all, thanks for the continued submissions, and the feedback!

As some may have noticed, we now have a lot more features on LS Blogs, including showing YOUR FEEDS on site.
We automatically retrieve feeds blogs that have known feeds, and they are shown on the more details page for your blog.

That means when people are looking for blogs, they can see not only a snapshot of what your blog page looks like, but also see
summaries of your latest posts! If they like what they read, they simply click and visit your blog.

You dont even need to worry about doing anything, no need to ping us, or remember to let us know when your blog updates,
we take care of it all for you. At least once a day (but usually more often!) we check for updates to your blog, and update
accordingly! So if you are going to submit your blog - make sure you include your feed details.

Another feature that is proving popular, is that the data from your feeds is searchable! When people search lsblogs for a topic, it no longer just searches the keywords you entered, or the url/ title of your blog - now it also looks to see who has blogged about the topic they are searching for! This means there is much more chance of someone who is interested in what YOU blog about, actually finding YOUR blog :)

For those who like the techy stuff, I am trialing XML-RPC pings, more techy details can be found here. This can be used to have your blog software automatically let us know you have updated, and update LS Blogs automatically before the next main update.

If this proves popular, I may add even more to this, there is a lot of scope for extra features :)

To give even more exposure to blogs listed, and to provide a unique way of seeing a cross section of blogs/opinions I have added a random excerpts page, which shows random posts from your blogs. Its a great way of finding interesting posts that you may miss out on otherwise. Plus as its random, it gives good exposure to all blogs that have known feeds.

I have updated the add url page to make it clearer what the problems were for people who had problems listing there site,
it now gives you a little description of what needs fixing before the submission will be entered, hopefully that will
make it a lot easier (previously it was a little unclear as to what was wrong, as it only highlighted the bad fields in red, with
no textual description of the problem.

Those of you with an eye for detail, may have noticed that the numbers on the directory structures dont always tie up
with how many results are actually in those categories.
Why is this? Well its all the rage, googles numbers never seem to be accurate these days, so it must be the in-thing to do :)
Actually, its down to a little problem with the code, and it occured when people submitted their sites into the wrong
categories. Sometimes when the sites were moved to a more suitable category, the numbers were not updated.
I am aware of this, its a easy enough problem to fix, but its low
priority at the moment, but it will get sorted (when time is found!)

The newest features link on the main page lists some new features, breifly, thumbnails, improved item details, and the info tool.

Looking for feedback on all items, so dont be afraid to comment!

After submitting a page, you can now register with LS BLogs, I recommend doing so, as that way you will be first to
know about new features, and may even get to trial run some beta features if you want to!

(if after registering with us, you dont get a email from us within say 48 hours, then please email us, or leave a comment here, with
your site url - as we need to know if our email system has any problems!)

Thats all for now,


ken

We have been reviewed in Research Buzz!

They like our list of search engines/directories for blogs :)

They did comment on the more details feature not displaying much, looks like it was just bad timing, as I released the blog info tool shortly after they reviewed the site! In addition to the blog info tool, sites that have rss feeds will display the feeds in the more info box, along with the ability to subscribe to that feed in one of many popular readers.


The blog info tool is the latest feature, it lets you check (via the great sites like technorati and several others)
who is linking to your blog, who is writing about, the traffic ranking in alexa, etc. Its a pretty handy little
tool that saves you going backwards and forwards between sites and inputting the search information all the time.
Just click on the more details page for the site that interest you, and you will see the link for the info tool.

Its brand new, so any comments or suggestions would be welcome. Perhaps you know of a great site that is missing
from it, that could be added? Let me know by leaving a comment.
If you find it useful, dont forget to blog about us, the more word that spreads the better!

Google has now done a nice deep crawl of the site, somany of the sites that submitted in the past have made it into google - and of course this site is getting more listins in google due to it ;)
Ls Blogs is also now listed as a blog directory / resource site in DMOZ (only found that out by accident the other day!)
The thumbnails went live in version 0.7, they are pretty much fully automated, so should be updated on a fairly regular basis. Not to sure how I will go with this, I think allowing the people who submitted the blog to request an update would be the best bet. After all if you have sweated blood and tears on updating your blog, its only fairthat you dont have to put up with the old look in the thumbnails.
Still working on the user registration code (so you can update your listing details/thumbnails).
One benefit of registering will be that I can keep users informed of new updates (like these thumbnails, and the super duper new .... oops nearly let it slip whats coming next there!).

Still having a few teething problems with css, but getting there slowly (its the best way to learn, just doing it!)
Apologies for when the site does break down a little on certain browsers, but rest assured when I notice it, or it gets pointed out, I get busy and get fixing ;)

If you have been following the site for a while you may have noticed the whats new box has changed, it now shows a few more entries, to give more exposure to recent submissions. I think a full page of new entries would be nice, so I think I will add that to my list of things to do.

Submissions are coming in much more frequently now, sometimes there are too many to do in one go, as they would knock the first entries of the whats new bit on the front page, so I make sure I do them in small batches to ensure submissions get a decent amount of time on the main pages. So dont worry if you have submitted a site and its not showing yet.

Very few blogs have been rejected, the only reason for rejections so far, is blogs set up just for advertising, with just one post in, and its obvious its just a placeholder advert for a website. Submitting to the wrong category may also cause a delay or rejection dont submit a personal blog to the directory of blog search engines.... Its not a search engine site you are submitting, its a blog - so it goes in the blog section. My reason for being dubious about submissions in the wrong category are that the submitter obviously has not read the how to submit rules or guidelines. Plus there are only a few cats, so its not like its rocket science or anything!

Again, a big thanks to all those that linked back, it really is appreciated. (and remember, if you submit your site in loads of categories, and dont link back, my patience only goes so far.....)

Things are picking up, expect to see the site improve with more features, and some nice useful services for the bloggers out there.

If you have any comments, or spot any problems, dont forget to leave a commentin the blog.

Web logs have now passed the 50 mark, so things are starting to pick up a little bit,
ok so 50(ish) isnt a huge amount, but they are all real, and hand submitted - not just
a copy of dmoz results.

I am currently trying out a couple of advertising schemes on sites, so hopefully that will pay off and
we will see lots of new submissions! I must admit I particularily like the blogexplosion site that appeared from nowhere a few days ago. Its one of those traffic exchange site, but
just for blogs and blogging related sites. As it states, the concept is simple. You visit blogs, and other people visit you.
I have found it very addictive, so much so I didnt get much done on this site yesterday!

But the good news is, I am currently testing something which I think will be of use to many bloggers out there,
Im writing it as I go along, so I dont want to release any details yet, in case it does not happen - but keep your eyes
peeled for announcements.