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Making my blog work

Making my blog work

I've just read a couple of things about how to publish a successful blog. One is by Andy Graham Hobotraveler.com (Travel Blog Theory) and the other is 5 Ways to building a better blog recommended by my friend Karthik.

The most important thing written by Neil at Pronetadvertising is: "Write quality content that readers can benefit from."

Andy writes about the strategy of how to write content: make an attention-grabbing title, include a photo, write opinions about the photo, and include a quote. He also writes about sticking to one subject and technical strategy for rss and atom feeds, among other things.

I've figured out most of these things on my own while blogging for the past seven months. I've gotten better at trying to write a blog entry that's not too long and not too short, and sticks to one subject.

On the technical side, the past week in Bangalore I've been working at Reliance Webworld on my blog feed. I've been trying to make sure that the feed is generated correctly. To do this, I have checked blog aggregation sites like bloglines.com and technorati.com to make sure that it is being fed successfully. Even then, some aggregation sites seem to not be able to index old blog entries that they missed the first time.

In July, my pages began to be indexed by Google. Up to that point, only the front page was indexed, which wasn't very useful. Then over a period of a few days it started to be indexed and each day on Google I could see more pages which were indexed. That was fun.

I can find out all sorts of things about web traffic to my site by using the smarter stats tool that my web webhosting company, hostmysite.com, provides. Now I get between two hundred and three hundred visitors a day. It is not straightforward to sort out how many of these visitors are webbots, how many are people I've told the site about via email, how many arrive from a bogus trackback link, and how many arrive from search engine and blog feeds. I probably receive under a hundred legitimate visitors a day.

Making my blog work

Hi Mark

The reason that aggregation sites don't index your old entries is that you only serve the last 15 entries in your feed. If you want to achieve that all entries are indexed, simply remove temporarily the 'number of entries' restriction in the feed generator.

Daniel

Hi Dan:

Thanks. I'm aware of the 15 feeds generated by my rss link and the 30 feeds generated by my atom link. I may go into the code and change this.

Bloglines.com aggregates the past 30 feeds without a problem. It is technorati.com that is sticking in my craw. It posts the last four entries that I have made since I successfully automated pinging the blog aggregators. But the previous entries are from fifteen days before, when I manually pinged technorati. It skips the entries in between and doesn't pick them up from the current rss and atom feeds.

But no matter, I can only do so much.

Mark

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