LS Blogs, the blog directory and search engines very own blog.
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Category — Uncategorized

Merry Christmas!

LSBlogs would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, and a happy new year.

December 24, 2007   No Comments

Search Engine Optimisation Category Updated

I have manually cleaned out the link rot from the SEO/SEM category, thankfully the category was fairly clean, but it is a few pages shorter now due to dead blogs or never updated blogs being removed. A few were moved to more appropriate categories and some were updated as they had moved to new URL’s.

Also done a little change to the doctype, and the html to fix a couple of minor problems but that should not affect users of the site, other than making some foreign blogs easier to read on screen.

Queue is now at 5301 blogs..

November 16, 2007   No Comments

Login fixed.

The problem with the login code has now been sorted, looks like I accidently uploaded a old version of the file somehow…

It works now, so you can log in and update your account details if required, for example if you have moved your blog to a different url, or would like the description updated etc.

At present, the updates are still ‘hand’ approved, and I have not written the code to automate the updating of the database in that area (so I have to do it by hand!) - so until I get that done it will be anywhere from a few hours to a few days before updates to blogs show (assuming they are accepted, I would love to just allow everyone to edit the data live, but there are to many spammers out there who submit a legitimate blog, then wait a while and change it to a spammy one)

I am slowly going through the code, tidying things up, and will be implementing improvements along the way. There is still a lot left to do, the surface has only been scratched so far!

October 24, 2007   No Comments

More cleaning up..

As well as continuing with the previously mentioned tasks, I am now cleaning up the data on the more details pages.

Several hundred incorrect feeds have been removed (automated) and around the same number have been either deleted or moved by hand where the automated tool didnt spot them.

Again, I am using this as a learning experience, and slowly building up the toolset to keep the directory clean.

Still a long way to go, can only handle so many in one day, but already its taking less time to read the new posts and update the database, as its not having to trawl through as many dead entries now.

I also noticed quite a few blogs had been using the ’submission url’ field (meant for sites such as blog directories or blog hosts to put in their add url or create blog url etc) as a spam link to their other blogs, or sites. Those are being deleted, not automated yet, but will be soon (for most of them).

As always there will be ones that need to be hand checked, and I am also thinking of keeping an eye on who is abusing the system like this, and booting the persistant offenders, along with their submissions.

Obviously Im not talking about the odd mistake, or wrong entry now and again, but the people who submit many, many blogs, and are trying to game the system (some so called professional SEO companies, who usually cant even get their own URL right are the worst offenders, no offence to any genuine SEO companies, but their are some right cowboys out in the world….)

October 17, 2007   No Comments

Updates..

Wiped another 400 or so blogs out of the system today that were dead, or redirecting to parked sites etc, and checked through the first couple of thousand blogs for ones that were redirecting to manually correct their entries and put in the correct urls (and correct the feeds also whilst I was there).

I will (over time) go through the rest of the system, but as you can imagine its a big task with so many blogs in the system!

All msn spaces blogs on the system were updated to use the correct address, as msn changed the format some time ago, and not everyone had updated their data, so I have gone through and done them all (thankfully their are not that many listed yet).

Plus, Im using this as a ‘learning’ experience and its helping to build up a useful toolset for the directory so I can automate more of the directory ‘cleaning’ tasks.

October 14, 2007   No Comments

Status update.

The queue is now down to under eight thousand, even new ones are coming in every day, I am managing to accept blogs *and* remove dead wood from the directory.

For example, yesterday I ran a admin tool to check the blogspot blogs that had been submitted, and found over 100 that were dead (as in deleted, giving a 404 message on blogspot).

Its not really as simple as that, as I have to manually check each one, as sometimes false 404’s get reported, but if it fails the auto-check, and also the manual check, then its gone.

Thats one hundred dead ones removed from the directory in one swoop, cleaning up the categories, search results, and also getting the queue down a little more (as un-approved ones are also checked).

The new server is still going strong, even under load, its hardly breaking into a sweat.
Its still early days, a year or two on this server will be a really good test as to the longer term reliablity ;)

October 13, 2007   No Comments

Comments re-enabled

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.

September 24, 2007   No Comments

Problem found - Problem Fixed!

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.

September 21, 2007   1 Comment

Search fixed.

Turns out it was a mysql bug with a left join, just needed to use brackets around it.

Well documented, and a easy fix :)

Now to test everything else!

September 19, 2007   No Comments

Updates

The move to the new server has gone well,  the site is running a lot faster now :)

Today, I updated the server with newer versions of apache, mysql and php, the upgrade went smoothly, but there are a few teething problems.

One of those is the search facility, its not showing any results, I am going to look into it later today, as it looks like I need to tweak a couple of things for use with the newer version of php.

As for blogs, I have got the queue down by a few hundred blogs (still over 9.5 thousand to go!) and also managed to weed out rather a lot of ‘dead’ blogs.

I will continue to weed out blogs that have died, or are redirecting to non-blog sites in order to keep the listings as useful and accurate as possible.

My first priority in the short term is to sort out any teething problems with the latest update, then its back to getting that queue down!

Thanks for your patience!

September 19, 2007   No Comments