When am I going to learn?
Published Tue, Oct 23 2007 7:18 PM
Technorati Tags: Blogging
It started with the blog rolls. We all use them. They're supposed to help drive traffic to our sites, and for all I know they actually work, but not nearly as much as all that based on my perusal of my site traffic records and referring links. I actually get more traffic through search engine hits.
Anyway, for some bloggers, the blog rolls have another purpose. The more blog rolls you are on the more inbound links to your site there are. That improves your technorati ranking, and other rankings, including your pagerank. I guess if you're into "keeping score" that can be important.
Having lots of inbound links also improves your placement in search engine results too. So I guess it's important that way if you want to drive traffic to your site.
I recently participated in the "SEO Tag" meme. In retrospect I wonder if that was such a good idea. Rosemary and I had an email discussion about some of the links in that post, and a large number of them were to SEO sites or to sites that either had little in the way of quality content.
Of course "quality" is in the mind of the reader, but I'm not really interested in advice for the lovelorn or what someone's cat did yesterday. I doubt that someone looking for political content will either.
Participating in blog rolls is a lot like SEO Tag. It gives you lots of inbound links and lots of outbound links. The more blog rolls you participate in the longer it takes to load your page, because each blog roll has to be loaded separately and rendered individually by the browser.
I tried doing server side retrieval of the blog rolls and caching the content. As long as the blogrolling.com servers were running smoothly this worked quite well. The first person hitting a page would have a slight delay while the blog rolls were retrieved. Everyone in the next ten minutes that hit a page would get the cached version of the blog rolls and the page load time would be shorter by as much as half a minute.
Some time back, Blogrolling.com's service degraded horribly, so I moved all of the blogrolling.com blog rolls on my site to a separate page, off of the main page. I did this because when blogrolling.com has problems trying to retrieve the blog rolls can take a while, especially when each request times out. The more blog rolls you participate in the worse the problem gets.
Blogrolling.com's service has been good at times and horribly slow at other times. Their servers have had problems and they've fixed them and new problems have occurred. Lately, when I try to ping their server to let it know that I've updated the ping fails with an HTTP 404 error. I guess they've moved the RPC interface.
I've railed and raged against this and said that third party services are a terrible thing to rely upon. You'd think by now that I would have learned.
I don't know what it is about bloggers, but we seem to love to put all sorts of technological wizbang gadgets on our sites. It's cool to be able to drop a line or two of script into our page templates and have blog rolls "magically" appear. A lot of people like to use the Snap Preview Anywhere code to turn all of the outbound links into popup balloons with images of the target sites.
It's just more script after all. But of course if the server provided by Snap is down page load times get longer. And then, sometimes those popup balloons pop up when you don't want them to. I know that the preview service has gotten better, and that there are more options to make it less intrusive, but it's still not for my site.
Some time back, julia974 introduced herself in the comments on one of my posts. I spent a bit of time remarking on it and wishing that we had a better way of ranking websites that might drive traffic to them, traffic that was interested in the content.
Along comes Spotback. Spotback's widgets are pretty cool. They work together on your site to produce a list of "recommended" posts. Recommended by your site readers that is.
If you set things up right, you can include a little rating widget at the bottom of each post (I've done that) that allows the reader of a post to rate it from 1 to 5. The more ratings it gets the closer it reflects what your site readers really think.
The other widget can go in your sidebar or where ever, and as people rate your posts it lists the ones that have been rated. That way people can see what other people recommend on your site. This doesn't quite get to the level of the rating system I'd like to see for all blogs, but it's nice for a single blog.
That is, it's nice until the Spotback servers become unresponsive. Then most of a page will load, until it get's to the Spotback code, and the page load will hang. Just like when Blogrolling.com gets hosed. Or technorati.
So, sadly it's time to say good-bye to the spotback ratings widget. I'll be removing it from the site sometime later tonight.
So what about other third party services? Well, I'm still going to use technorati. Strangely enough I get a lot of hits through them.
I'm also going to keep using AKismet to filter spam, even though I have to filter through a lot of e-mail to find the false positives and accept the trackbacks or comments. I don't even mind when AKismet takes its time figuring out if a trackback or comment is spam. After all, that doesn't affect a page load.
I gave up on Haloscan for comments and trackbacks on my site as soon as I managed to implement my own version. I never had a problem with their widgets, but I got lucky. I had my own version of trackbacks and comments implemented before a bunch of people noticed that they had server problems. Haloscan has since fixed their problems, but I still can't use my own trackback pinger to trackback to sites that rely on Haloscan so I still have my account with them to send trackbacks to people that use their services.
Probably the best third party service I've seen is from Ferdinand T Cat's blogging empire. The blogger's oasis and linkfest haven deluxe are awesomely cool and don't interfere with my site in any way.
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