Category — LS Blogs News/Updates

I have temporarily turned off the forum, due to the amount of spammers signing up (and not posting!)

It appears they were doing it for the link in their profile, which was pointless, as I removed them all a while ago, but spammers are a little stupid….

I will leave it disable for a while, they may give up. In the meantime, I think I will look into just deleting the existing forum, installing a brand new version, and integrating it so only people with accepted blogs can post, that means the memberlist would consist of people already in lsblogs, no more dual sign up required.

I have a few ideas, well loads actually, its just finding time to do any of them!

Blog comments were disabled for a while due to the amount of spam arriving.

A continuous amount of spam comments were arriving, so I turned it off till a captcha was put in place. Hopefully that should stop the majority, and allow only genuine comments.

Turns out there has been another glitch with the move, I was wondering why the submissions suddenly stopped dead… For some reason one of the fields in the database had switched of it’s Autoincrement - and defaulted to 0… Meaning no new blogs could be successfully submitted.
Its meant a drop in submissions for a couple of days, but its all sorted now.

I am trying to get rid of as many of the ‘decaying’ blogs as possible, I found a lot of blogs that were now dead, or redirecting, lost count, but I would say at least a few hundred removed now - and a lot more will follow!
Im semi-automating the process, but its a longer term thing, as time permits. It may mean that occasionally a blog gets deleted by accident, if that happens just drop me a line in the forum and I can look into it. Due to the sheer number of spammers who submitted blogs, and change requests I have not been able to cross reference every change request with every dead blog, so its possible one or two may have gone that should still be in.

If yours is one of them, let me know in the forum.

I have deleted all the screenshots that were requested to be changed, and they are now in the queue for recreation, so dont worry if your screenshot is not present, it will correct itself when it gets regenerated.

As for getting rid of the decay, the usual reasons for a blog going are,

It has been deleted.

It has been redirected to a different site (not the same blog)

Its now a parked domain.

Its crashed - or the posts have been removed

It has not been updated for years, and there is little content.

You can still keep submitting, I have the blog queue down to about 9400 blogs now, so still a long to go BUT if your blog meets the criteria, it will get shown in time.

Actually, I quite like having the long queue, its has a nice side effect in that a lot of the blogs set up for a spam purposes, or with little effort dont last long and will be dead, or showing there true colours by the time I get round to check them.

I have managed to get back up to speed with the submission queue, lots of new blogs have been accepted, although there are still several hundred waiting patiently in the queue. If yours is one of them, dont worry I will be getting around to it soon.

As lsblogs gets more popular the amount of spam submissions also grows, you would not believe (well perhaps you would) how many non-blogs get submitted, I dont know why they bother, as they just get deleted, and often a ban applied.

Finally, we moved servers again recently, this time back to godaddy, as the beta program we were on ended before schedule due to unexpected issues. The move went smoothly, apart from a few hours downtime, but all is back up and running again. I have not decided where to keep the site, I may move to another server if I experience problems on godaddy. One plus point is the major problem I had with godaddy not being able to open remote files (the site started of on godaddy) is now no longer an issue. Only downtime and speed are concerns now, I will give them a spin and see how they go, if they are up to it, then I will stay, if not, another move will be in the pipeline.

For those that noticed a little downtime the other day, its due to the fact that lsblogs is currently hosted on a server that is in beta test, and a little glitch occured, which was fixed quite quickly.

Some may notice a slight slow down in the number of new blogs being approved each day, dont worry, any sites that have been submitted are still in the (ever growing!) queue, I am just spending a little less time accepting blogs for a short while, as I am developing another site. LS Blogs is still my main priority, and updates will pick be back up to speed shortly, I just prefer to slow down a little to get some time to work on the other site whilst it is in its early stages.

I dont have much luck with monitors, some people can keep one for years without any problems, but not me. My monitor is playing up badly, at first it was not to bad, just going a odd shade of yellow from time to time - but now the picture keeps shrinking and stretching at random.

A good thump seems to bring it back to normal, but past experience tells me that it wont be that way forever, and sooner or later thumping will not work.

I do have a backup monitor, but dont fancy dragging it out of the attic, nor using it, I have become quite used to a 19″ screen, and going back to a tiny one isn’t my idea of fun.

Guess a new monitor is on the shopping list (or a really good second hand one )

Meanwhile, back to blogs - I have deleted quite a lot of blogs from LS Blogs today, lots of expired domains and blogs that for some reason had all posts removed. I know deleting entries like this on a regular basis means I wont have “impressive” numbers of blogs listed, but at least the ones that are listed are not mainly dead ones, which is more important than pure numbers in my opinion.

Traffic has been steadily increasing since lsblogs started, at the moment, as you can see from the Alexa Graph below its spikes up and down quite a lot, but its getting close to the 20,000 mark.

For those that dont know alexa, and how it ranks sites, basically a ranking of 1 is the best, traffic ranking gets more accurate the lower the ranking gets, and at the moment we are averaging our highest levels yet.

Since adding the categories on the main pages, the page view count has also increased,
quite dramatically, so not only are we getting more visitors, they are looking at more pages when
they visit.

I still accept roughly the same number of blogs each day, but I do reject more blogs each day than I used to, as part of getting more exposure, means more spam submissions.

Once a site gets “known” it starts to attract submissions from the most unlikely of sources, you would be amazed at the amount of businesses that submit their main websites as blogs, and expect to get in the directory. Often many of them come from the same submitter, and I almost feel sorry for them when I hit the ban button, and ALL their submissions disapear for good.

But, on the plus side, we are getting lots of quality submissions, which is another reason I really want to get the search functions perfected, to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.

The other day, I managed to make a few adjustments which have speeded up the site, there is room for a lot more improvement, so dont expect things to stay the same, they can only get better. It just takes time, thats all - but lsblogs is here for the long term.

I am working on improving the search results on LS Blogs, the search functions have been a little lacking up till now, and they still need a lot of work.

Over the coming months I will be fixing the search routines to provide a much better service, at the moment I have just tweaked the code so it only returns the first 300 matches found, this stopped the memory error that some people may have experienced.

Its not perfect, but at least it doesnt crash now….

I will be adding advanced search functions at some point in the future, and making the search results a lot more relevant and easy to use, but it will all take time - but should be worth the wait.

No doubt the search will go through a few changes before I am finnished, as I learn from mistakes, and find the best way forward. There is a lot of data to search, and I dont have a army of coders working for me (its just little old me doing it all…), nor do I have an array of computers working behind the scenes.

So I need to make sure that whichever method I choose isnt to intensive for the server to cope with, as it has to serve the site out, as well as perform searches or index the data at the same time. Plus, finding a way to filter out duplicate results, which is a problem at the moment will be fun

Ideally I want to make the search fast, and easy to use, with the emphasis on returning useful results that are easy to understand.

Plenty of ideas on things I can do, its just finding the time, and figuring out the best ways to do certain things.

With a bit of luck though, this time next year the search will be a lot better

Seeing as a new version of wordpress is available, I decided now would be a good time to upgrade, seeing as I had not done any modifications yet.

The upgrade process really was painless, and quite quick, with the longest part being a backup of all wp files and the database.
Now I just have to see what new features are available.

Many of you may be aware that you can personalise (I spell it with a S as I am English, in case any americans were wondering) your google homepage.

I have added a module that you can add to your google homepage, should you wish to do so, that displays a random blog from the LS Blogs blog directory each time the page is shown.

You can personalise your homepage by visiting google.com/ig and select from the standard modules which ones you want, or you can add one of the many custom modules.

To add the Random Blog module, you need to click the “Add Content” content link at the top, then on the left you will see

Create a Section

You need to enter

http://lsblogs.com/gmodule_random_blog.xml

and hit the go button.

It is my first module, and if it proves popular, I may expand its features, and add more modules in the future.
 
Hope you like it, if you do, feel free to blog about it so others know, after all if your blog is listed in the directory, your blog could be the one that pops up randomly on someone elses google home page. Note, blogs in the adult category are not shown by the random blog module, only the blogs in the non-adult categories.
Obviously some blogs may contain some material that is not work or child safe, so as always, its at your discretion whether to allow use of the tool