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

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

Happy new year everyone, hope 2006 goes well for you all,

Thanks to everyone who helped make LS Blogs what it is today, good luck with your blogging, and dont get to drunk - those hangovers can be horrific

Best wishes

ken

www.lsblogs.com

Its not technically a White Christmas for LS Blogs, as it didn’t snow on Christmas day, but its snowing now! Apologies for the poor picture, but I have been up all night, and didnt fancy venturing too far to grab a quick picture of the snow.

Also, my camera is not exactly waterproof (or snowproof for that matter)

Found this posted at the searchenginewatch blog (details here)

(yes, the spelling mistake is intentional, its how it was posted)

Google Recruits Creator of Pyhton

+ Dirson,
posts about another successful recruitment of progammer by Google. It
appears that Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming
language, is now a Google employee.

Python is not a language I have used yet, but it has a active following, and getting the creator of a programming language on your team is always a handy achievement. Wonder if google will suddenly start providing a lot of new support for python now?

Also, if you like reading blogs from google employees, then that same post has interesting news about blogs by googlers.

Google employee’s are just people like the rest of us, but they do work for google, which has a lot of power on the internet, so you never know what interesting hints and tips you may gleen from their blogs.

As you may be aware, lsblogs does not just list blogs, it also lists sites related to blogging, including forums that discuss blogging.  One site I visit frequently, which is not just about blogging, is the cre8asite forums

Today, I noticed a interesting thread - someone took on a spammer and won compensation from the firm that spammed him. Whilst the amount won is not enough to retire on, its certainly a interesting victory, and one that may open the floodgates for lots of other people to take on the spammers.

If spammers start getting hit where it hurts them the most, financially, then perhaps, just perhaps, one day spam may be a thing of the past.

Cre8asite Forums -> Businessman wins e-mail spam case

QUOTE
A businessman has won what is believed to be the first victory of its kind by claiming damages from a company which sent him e-mail spam.

Nigel Roberts, who lives in Alderney in the Channel Islands, took action against Media Logistics UK over junk e-mails in his personal account.

Under new European laws, companies can be sued for sending unwanted e-mails.

The Stirlingshire-based firm has agreed to pay £270 compensation to Mr Roberts, who runs an internet business.

‘Tiny victory’……

Whilst checking one of the recently added blogs (Blog Rootz, see more details here)
which has a great selection of tools and blog related sites, I spotted something interesting.

UrlTrends is a site that lets you get a whole host of information about your site, and how it is fairing in the major search engines.

For example, it brought up the following information for LS Blogs,

Current Rankings:
PageRank: 7/10
Alexa Rank: 60,885

Incoming Google Links: 15,500
Incoming Yahoo Links: 251,000
Incoming MSN Links: 259,376
Incoming Alexa Links: 0
Overall Incoming Links: 525,876 (Overlap is possible - Estimated 457,283 unique links)

But it does not stop there, it shows a whole set of interesting, and useful graphs from the ranking in search engines, page rank, alexa rank even how many people have you bookmarked in social bookmarking tools like furl and del.icio.us

One thing that caught my eye, was it didnt just show the current status of the site, it showed graphs over a period of time. Now, its highly likely that many sites may not have been monitored previously by the site, so not everyone will get a history showing, but for those that do, its quite interesting to view.

Another useful feature, is the ability to compare trends for several sites, so if you want to see how your site fares against another, you can do so easily.

At present this blog is “standalone”, when I get some time I will be looking at the wordpress code, and seeing if I can find a nice easy method to integrate content from the blog onto LS Blogs itself.

My plans are to incorporate a few posts from the blog on to the main pages, the links will take you directly into this blog, or I could completely integrate the blog into the site, my plans are uncertain on that one for now.

Obviously, it will take a little time, and firstly I want to concentrate on getting some more content into the blog, and as its been a long long time since I used wordpress, I will need to get familiar with it all again first .

Im actually writing these posts using a nifty tool called Performancing for Firefox.

You can find out more, and download it here

Basically, its like having a word processor in your browser, that integrates directly with your blog.
It works, and it works very well - very impresssive, and something I can see myself using for quite some time to come.

I highly recommend a look, its well worth a visit………….

Time for another blog, this one is LS Blogs own blog.

Its not the first time I have had a blog on LS Blogs, for quite some time I ran a nucleus blog, but that was not updated very often, and ended up innundated with spam comments for gambling sites and online
pharmacies!

This time around, I am using wordpress, simply as a change, and comments are allowed, but have to approved by myself first, which should keep those spammers at bay.

Often when accepting blogs, or just browsing the directory I notice interesting posts in blogs, so if something catches my eye, I will post it (no, this does not mean I will just be posting lists of links, I will try to add my own views on things, as well as a link to the place I spotted the news or article)

Please bear with me whilst the blog takes shape, it may take some time, but it will get there eventually.