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

Random header image... Refresh for more!

Merry Christmas!

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

December 24, 2007   No Comments

Meta tags improved.

Special thanks go to Ray who runs a eco friendly printing firm also does the eco friendly alocalprinter.com blog for his recent forum posting about the latest addition to google’s webmaster tools.

I would have missed that one for quite a while, what with christmas coming up ;)

Anyways, I tried out the new features (google reporting issues with meta tags) and found that I did have some issues on site, and fingers crossed - they are now sorted out ;)

They will need more work, as you can imagine with a large site like this with many tens of thousands of pages, there will be scope for improvement!

So, don’t forget if you have your site verified with google to pop over to your webmaster tools to see the new additions.

December 16, 2007   No Comments

Has Blogging reached its peak?

I know this post is technically a little early, as it is not 2008 yet, but back in 2006 a firm of analysts predicted that blogging would reach its peak in 2007.

Gartner predicted that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million. Link to news article

Well its nearly the end of the year in question, and technorati is currently indexing over 112 million blogs, and new blogs are still being created - the queue here for submissions is still large, new submissions are still pouring in, so I dont see any sign of it levelling off..

If anything, blogging seems more popular than ever, as I am seeing a lot of talk about blogs in forums, there was even a tv show on UK tv the other night about sexual confession blogs written by annonymous women (Sex in the Naughties).

Has blogging reached its peak? Personally I dont think so, not yet..

December 12, 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

Search results improved + Queue status.

I have not really spent much time yet on the search results, improving them has been on the ‘to-do’ list for quite a long time now, as they were returning many duplicate results.

I am experimenting (and learning) with the search feature at the moment, I have imlemented the first test, which seems a big improvement over the previous code, its no longer listing pages full of duplicate results now.

I will be tweaking the code as time permits, to further improve it.

The submission queue is now just under 5800 blogs, I have managed to remove many more dead blogs from the directory, and cleaned up a load of blogs that were never updated for a long time.

November 10, 2007   4 Comments

Page pagination improved.

The old pagination was not scaling up very well in many categories (due to the amount of entries in them), it was simply showing page 1,2,3,4 right up to page 100 or more in a long line at the bottom of the screen.

I have rewritten it so it now shows First, Previous, Next and Last along with the a snipped selection of relevant page numbers.

It should make the navigation of the categories easier.

I have just done this on the pages that browse the categories for now, as long as it works fine for a while I will implement the same code in the search pages also.

Im still working slowly through sending out the newsletter previously mentioned, its not really a ‘newsletter’ as such, just a quick summary of a few things, and a little news, not a full blown marketing job so to speak ;)

Only sent out a couple of thousand(ish) so far, had a couple more opt-outs, but also had some valuable feedback about a couple of minor problems which I have corrected and a few people have popped in to update the blog descriptions, urls or keywords.

October 28, 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

Where did the login code go?

Yesterday I sent out the first batch of ‘news’ as a newsletter mass email to a batch of users,
it is *very* rare (in fact I think this is the first *mass* mailing done so far by the directory), so it was a learning experience for me.

I had a couple of replies, a couple of ‘opt me out’ replies, and even a thank you for the news from one person ;)

One interesting thing that came to light is the login code was not working, I checked into it and well, they are right - I have no idea what happened, but the login code has been overwritten.

I need to figure out what caused that, then fix it, so the login code is down till I sort that out, but that should be done fairly soon.

I also found out there is a daily limit on the emails I can send on this server, which explains why they suddenly stopped sending… I think I will have to ask to have that limit increased, just in case I ever do need to do a mass email in a emergency (unlikely, but I would like the opportunity to be able to do so, just in case…)

October 23, 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