A Small Victory: go forth and ping

Go make Laurence a god. Get the vote out.

go forth and ping

Your blogging tips, tricks and commands of the day:

1. If you aren't pinging Weblogs.com, why not? It's nice when I look over at my blogroll and see all those *hot* blogs, letting me know which site has fresh content at a glance. I'm at work, here. I can't spend my entire day clicking through sites to see who has updated. I have to actually do some work in between my blog reading! You trying to get me fired? Go to Weblogs.com right now and register your blog and save my job!

2(a): Are you using blogrolling.com to manage your links? Well, you should be. Not only is it infinitely easier to do than going into your template and handcoding links every time you want to add or delete or someone changes their URL, but it is idiot-proof also. Just add the "blogroll this" gizmo to your toolbar and your link list will grow by the thousands will relative ease!

(b) If you are using blogrolling, I ask a favor of you. I like to look at my referrer stats at least ~~200~~ 50 10 times a day to see where my visitors are coming from. If you are using blogrolling, then my referrer stats will just show this really long URL that will lead me to your bloglist. But I still have no idea who you are or where your blog/site is located, or if one of your visitors happened to come here from there. (Try to stay with me here, ok?)

So what I did was this; I blogrolled myself. If you look at the top of both my blogrolls, you will see it says "me." This way, when my blogroll URL shows up in someone's stats and they click on it and get my list, they just have to click on the "me" link to see where the visitor came from. You get to visit my site, I get to visit yours and we can start up a mutual admiration society.

That did make sense, right?

Now ping me, baby.

(the preceding were not paid advertisements. If they were, I would have been more forceful about it)

Comments

I posted a link to a step-by-step on how to one-click ping weblogs.com on my own blog... it's the link with "come back soon" on it.

Posted by: Laurence Simon | November 4, 2002 11:36 AM

Gah! So technical! Brain... melting...

See, MT just automagically pings weblogs, and has for awhile. I'm such a retard it never ocurred to me that this was important or had anything to do with anything.

This blogosphere can be a complicated place. So many ways to screw up. :)

Ah well, research time! Thanks!

Posted by: scott | November 4, 2002 11:54 AM

Is there a program(s) to create and maintain a blog or do you HTML it yourself?

Thanks!

Posted by: Curiouser | November 4, 2002 01:08 PM

Try blogger for starters.

Posted by: michele | November 4, 2002 01:22 PM

i'm a non-geek. i signed up at blogroll but gave up when i saw all the work involved. i've already put all those links in my page. maybe i'm missing something but it looked to me like i would have to put all the links into blogroll one by one. why would i do all that work again?

Posted by: deborah | November 4, 2002 01:46 PM

nevermind. i just got off of my lazy ass (so to speak) and figured it out.

Posted by: deborah | November 4, 2002 01:54 PM

Is there something wrong with your sidebar code? All my referrers (except yours) comes through as though it was from their site.

Yours is the only one that comes through as a blogrolling link.

Posted by: Ravenwood | November 4, 2002 01:58 PM

My theory (and it's my second theory today) on those that come through as a link vs. those that come through from the site--Michele has most of her blogroll not on her page. Anyone who uses blogrolling that way will show up as a mysterious person in your referral logs.

I just added myself to my blogroll, because I always do what beautiful women ask me to do.

Posted by: jadedju | November 4, 2002 02:05 PM

Good thoughts! I added the "me" link to my blogrolls. :)

Posted by: Jen | November 4, 2002 02:12 PM

Jason will correct me if I'm wrong (and what's the chance of that?), but if you use the PHP code for your blogroll, it should load the links into the page before it's displayed. That way, when someone clicks a link, it shows them coming from your site. No long url thingy. No need for your neato solution, Michele--unless you can't use PHP...in which case, it rocks!

Posted by: Solonor | November 4, 2002 02:44 PM

Well I can use PHP on my site. Knowing how to implement the code it is a completey different story.

Posted by: michele | November 4, 2002 02:46 PM

Nobody ever comes to my site, so I see little use in this for me. Besides, I haven't a clue what you guys are talking about.

Posted by: wKen | November 4, 2002 03:04 PM

wKen lies like a rug. Everyone comes to his site, because he's so intelligent and nice (in an evil sort of way).

To use the PHP code, just cut-and-paste. Select the PHP version at Blogrolling, and put it where you put the Java version in your template.

The only thing you'll have to change is either make your main index be INDEX.PHP, instead of INDEX.HTML, or tell Dreamhost to treat .HTML as a valid extension for launching PHP code. There's a good explanation of that in the Dreamhost Knowledgebase. It involves setting up a .htaccess file, but if I did it, how hard could it be?

Posted by: Solonor | November 4, 2002 03:33 PM

Put it this way - you just made my brain bleed. Forget, I'll offer Stacy sex in return for doing it for me.

Posted by: michele | November 4, 2002 03:39 PM

I use the PHP method too. Seems to work a lot better than the javascript. If you are going to use the javascript, though, that "me" link is an excellent idea! I never thought of it when I was using javascript.

Posted by: Kathy K | November 4, 2002 03:43 PM

Another idea is to check out your "blogging ecosytem" at http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem/

Posted by: Zelda | November 4, 2002 03:47 PM

Damn! I always forget the "or offer Stacy sex" codicil...

Posted by: Solonor | November 4, 2002 04:12 PM

The other way it'll come from a weird string of numbers is if you use the blogrolling sidebar on your browser (which I use constantly). It's easier to me than going to my page and clicking through from there. That way I can just happily right-click my way down the updated blogs, open 'em up in new tabs, and walk away to let them all load on my pathetic dialup.

So I'll add a 'me' link. It's a good idea, I'd wondered why it was, exactly, that Michele had that on her 'roll in the first place; makes sense, really.

Posted by: VASpider | November 4, 2002 05:00 PM

The "me" link seems like a good idea, but please humor a dumb question: how do you get blogroll to place it at the top of the stack with the rest in alpha order?

Posted by: dave dobbs | November 4, 2002 05:00 PM

Dave, either place it like this ::me::: or when you blogroll it, put in some blank spaces before you type "me."

Posted by: michele | November 4, 2002 05:07 PM

Having trouble comprehending ... must re-read (lack of sleep and latte).

Posted by: sian | November 4, 2002 05:26 PM

OK i give up, I'm totally confused ... why would I want to blogroll myself?

Posted by: sian | November 4, 2002 05:29 PM

I had blogrolled myself when I switched from blogger to MT.....best thing I ever did!

Posted by: Da Goddess | November 4, 2002 05:35 PM

I use an SSI file for my blogroll. It lets me update w/out rebuilding my template and it's all local, so no dependencies on the other service crapping out.

Only downside is it doesn't show me when people have updated their blogs, but I can live with that.

Posted by: Kevin | November 4, 2002 07:02 PM

slap forehead ok, I'm a little slow, it took me rereading the whole thing twice to get the "me" link. Gah! Now I get it!

Posted by: munin | November 4, 2002 09:40 PM

Too tired to comprehend all this right now. Must. Find. Gin.

Posted by: Mike | November 5, 2002 12:59 AM

I promise I'm not being smarmy, but tell me again why you'd want your list of links to grow by the thousands?

I'm not against linking to sites or anything. I appreciate that my site is somewhere in your blogroll, and do what you like... I just know I can't personally recommend that many blogs on the web. partly because I just don't have the time to read them and partly because most of them are just as uninteresting as my blog.

Posted by: martin | November 5, 2002 02:00 PM

I'm with Martin here on blogrolling.

I don't like lists. Much of the time, you're left clicking at random, and you're disappointed. Plus, you don't know whether the site's there because it's good, odd, interesting, or just run by someone whose not interesting, funny or much of a writer, but just happens to be a friend of the site-owner.

Me, I'm choosy about who I link to. If I don't go there, I don't link it. I also like to add a little personal insight as to why I like the site on the link. It's more of a sign of appreciation of someone's work.

This isn't a criticism of anyone else's approach, by the way. It's just how I approach the subject.

Posted by: Crimson Cow | November 5, 2002 08:05 PM

having a lot of links is all about variety. very spicy. and at the point blogrolling was just getting rolling, i had rolled my own homegrown database link solution to manage my link addiction. there was a choice to be made -- i stuck with my PHP/MySQL dealy.

it was the wrong choice. blogrolling is cooler, but the prospect of converting my hundreds (yes. hundreds.) of links to blogrolling, just makes me feel all lazy.

blogrolling rocks. it helps you not lose track of whatever great site you just found, and want to keep the link somewhere manageable.

i don't read all of my links everyday, but i do read all my links at some point. and they're all good.

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