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

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A few minor issues fixed.

After giving the new urls a thorough test, I discovered a couple of problems which are now corrected. The problem revolved around the pagee results, and 404 error handling also.

Easy fixes, so lets see how things go for now.

PS - I know the new 404 page for the directory is in bad shape, I need to tidy it up, make it more interesting, and useful, but it serves the purpose for now ;)

February 10, 2008   No Comments

At long last the move towards a friendlier URL structure.

At long last I have managed to set aside a little time to work on the URL’s for the site.

As you can see, many of the urls are not really human friendly, relying on numeric parameters instead of readable words.

I did have a few categories with friendly urls, but I never really got around to implementing a proper solution.

Thats changed now, and I have started the process of moving to friendlier urls.

As its a big change, I am only doing a few to start with, to make sure there are no unexpected problems, and as long as all goes well, I will continue to slowly change the other categories over time.

I am redirecting (with a 301 redirect) so anyone who has a link to the old style url will be redirected to the new url without any effort needed on their part (so no need to update any of your links to lsblogs, we are handling it all this end).

As well as this change, I have continued with the cleanup, and deleted more parked/dead/never updated blogs, added feeds to quite a few blogs, and corrected details of some blogs where appropriate.

And finally, at some point in the near future the site will be migrated to a new server, which may possibly involve a (small) amount of downtime, I will post more nearer the event.

February 9, 2008   1 Comment

A few small updates.

As well as continuing with the ever ongoing task of keeping the directory free from link-rot, I have fixed a few minor problems with international characters, and the displaying of some feeds on the more details pages for certain blogs.

A few small changes to the site have also been made (such as not showing the sort by options when there are insufficent blogs in a category to make sorting worthwile), I will be doing more things like this in the future as time permits.

There has also been a few new subcategories added , and we will continue to add categories where appropriate over time, in order to better categorise the listings, and reduce the amount of pages users have to look through to find what they are looking for. Existing listings that have been found to be suitable for those new categories have been moved into them, and we will continue to look out for others to move where appropriate.

January 30, 2008   No Comments

Cleanup Stage 2.

A second run through the listings has identified another set of blogs that have now been deleted from the Blog directory.

Many of these fell into either sites that had been wiped clean, and reverted to the default page for whatever service or operating system they are using, the rest were of a more pesky nature.

By pesky, I mean when the blogs in question were originally submitted, they would have contained genuine content, then at some point after acceptance, the contents were removed and replaced with ‘generated’ content.

The generated content is designed so that it could appear to be a English language document, with keywords inserted on a fairly regular basis. However, it is just garbage really, sentences merged together at random via software.

A few other blogs that had not been updated for years were also removed, and more sites that had moved have had their details updated.

January 25, 2008   No Comments

News.

First stage of another mass cleanup completed the other day, analysed every listed site looking for parked pages, and removed the ones found. As I find different styles of parked pages, I will add them to the cleanup routines to help keep the directory free from these type of pages.

Its not a easy task in some cases, as some are quite inventive in their methods, but procedures are being implemented which will help long term.

Many more blogs have had their feed details corrected, so more posts are being read and indexed for inclusion in the search results now.

And I have also identified quite a few sites that had moved without telling us, and manually searched out their new address to correct their details, or deleted them, if I could not easily find the new details (or the site had just died, with no forwarding address)

As a result of many listings being removed, this will mean the sites that are still going, providing good content may have moved up the list, providing better exposure. It also provides much cleaner search results, and user experience.

January 22, 2008   No Comments

New options added to search facility.

Previously when you searched on LS blogs, results were returned from all relavent categories, including the ones of a adult only nature.

Now the search box has the option to exclude adult only categories from the search results.

From this point on, the search will default to not displaying results from adult only categories, if you wish to include the adult only categories in the search results you can simply click the

(Show results from all categories)

option before you search.

To go back to the default option click

(Do not show results from Adult only categories)

Remember though, ticking do not show results from adult only categories *does not* mean you are guarenteed to see non adult results, as people can post anything at anytime on their blog.

It simply removes the *known* blogs that were accepted into the adult only categories.

Blogs of a adult nature, that may be offensive, or upsetting to some, could still be returned, so you should always exercise caution when searching (as you should on any site that allows you to view other peoples links/content).
We cant keep an eye on all the blogs in the directory, all the time, sometimes people change their blog without letting us know. In these instances it can take time before we notice, or someone reports it to us.

January 14, 2008   No Comments

You have to laugh sometimes…

One of the frequent tasks carried out here at LS Blogs is going through the queue removing unsuitable entries, or correcting mistakes in some cases.

Today, I found one entry that really put a smile on my face.

It was for a manual blog submission service, the type where you pay a company and they submit your blog to directories.

Well, you would assume that if they are submitting to directories for a living, they would be able to do a great job of their own submission for their own site.

Well, apparently not….

The description was as follows.

[NAME REMOVED FOR PRIVACY PURPOSES] Shop offer manual submission of your blog and RSS or Atom Feed to blog web directories, feed search engines, news services and web-based RSS aggregators at affordable price to improve your blog

But the kicker, was the url they entered……

http://Manual Blog Submission Service

Yes, you read that correctly they actually did put in

“http://Manual Blog Submission”

as the web address for their own site.

They must have realised their mistake afterwards so they submitted it again, with the correct url in this time.

But needless to say, BOTH submissions were in the wrong category completely - they did not even look for the right category to submit them into….

These people take other peoples money to submit to directories, and they cant even get put their own URL in correctly. Scary….

Needless to say, it went in the bin, along with the a couple of hundred of other bad submissions I found when looking today.

Some people go to great lengths to try to get in *multiple* submissions that are all pure spam, they must spend quite some time, but its all wasted when the delete and ban button gets pressed - and it also means that if they did submit a genuine entry along with the rest of the spam, they all go, even the genuine one…

January 13, 2008   No Comments

Site updates, apology, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I have been testing out a newer version of the bot that indexes all the feeds for the blogs listed in the directory, its taking some time to go through and iron out the problems, but it is proving worthwile.

It is throwing up a message each time a bad feed is found, which is enabling me to go and manually check that blog for a correct feed.

Many of the blogs have been parked, or changed to ‘invitation only’ or have been removed - so I have had a great clean up of the directory at the same time!

But as the dead ones are removed, many, many more feeds have been corrected, and are now being pulled in and indexed by the the blog directory.

I have to offer a apology to a few people at this time also, due to one of the tweaks made, the site started sending out the acceptance emails to some people when I was manually checking the blogs, and ‘re-accepting’ them with the corrected details.

This has now been corrected, sorry if you got a second acceptance email, you can ignore it!

After getting to the 8.5 thousand mark (the siteid) I need a little break ;) so will resume checking the rest at a later time.

Finally, LS Blogs would like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

All the best!

December 31, 2007   No Comments

Blogcharm Blogs - to be removed from directory soon.

Due to the sudden demise of Blogcharm, and the fact that blogcharm users appear to have lost their blogs, I will be deleting all blogcharm blogs from the directory - but not just yet.

I will wait a couple of weeks to give any users who have listings in the directory time to move to a new blog (if they are able to recover their posts from blogcharm) and to login to lsblogs to update their blog listing to the new address they choose.

Any that have not been updated after two weeks from now will be de-listed.

December 29, 2007   No Comments

Improved Blog Search

The search facility on LS Blogs has now been improved again, this improvement makes the search
a lot more useable. It is now returning results more often, and makes finding blogs, or content in blogs much easier than before.

This is just one of many improvements that will be implemented over time, hope you like it - it certainly seems to be working better for me when I use the search features.

December 28, 2007   No Comments