Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either.

The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done.

I checked back a week later and nothing since that day had been indexed. I sent another ticket and posted on the bulletin board the same day. Three days afterwards I received a reply to the first email and was told the blog had been indexed, what they didn’t say was it was done shortly after I made the problem known on the bulletin board. I have since had to make more than half a dozen posts in order to get the blog regularly indexed. Who ever is in charge of doing that does it pretty speedily and should be rewarded for it.

I have received several answers as to why this is happening from the board admin, and none of them are very likely. First I wasn’t given an answer. The second time I was told there was just a delay in indexing. The next time they blamed it on the number of anchor links some of my posts contain. They have blamed it on the number of tags. They have always fixed it an done an auto update but they refuse to address the key issue many bloggers are having. Neither the automatic ping services nor the manual ping at Technorati are working for many of us.

As I said this isn’t just my problem either. If you surf over to the Technorati discussion board you will find quite a few people who have gone a couple of days without being tracked to those who have gone weeks. One blogger reports his blog hadn’t been indexed for more than a year. I have no idea how often he posts, but Technorati simply can’t say his problem was a simple delay in indexing.

If you are a serious blogger with a Technorati account don’t just assume it has been working for you, go check it out. I know some of you are asking what the big deal is. First off if you are displaying the Technorati logo on your blog, you are advertising them in exchange for a service which includes indexing and providing search traffic. If they aren’t providing that, then they are operating on a fraudulent principal and should be paying you for the advertising. Secondly they are getting paid advertising because of the service they provide, I think the advertisers that pay them should be made aware that they aren’t getting everything they are paying for. I know I certainly would if I were paying big bucks to advertise on a site making claims of tracking a hundred million plus blogs, but only updating three quarters of their claim. The fact is they are a corporation and all corporations private or public need to be held accountable to proper standards.

I won’t debate whether they have the right or not to deny tracking of individual blogs, but the fact is they have an obligation to tell people that their blogs will not be tracked. They don’t even have to provide a reason, they just have to be honest about doing it. Of course none of us know if this is a softwarer glitch, which they have never admitted to, but they need to come out and say something one way or another. Failure to do or say something is the best way for them to lose their credibility. I can live with it being some sort of technical problem, we have all experienced those, but the fact is something needs to be done and done soon.

I am in no way an expert in Blogger or BlogSpot, but I am passing along to your a nice free article on how to write a theme there since I know some of you blog there.

How To Create A Blogger/Blogspot Theme by Brad

This tutorial will cover the steps needed to create your own blogger template. Many people have used blogger to run blogs and have wondered how they can make their own theme to use with it. There are a very few hard to find guides on how to do this, so I’ve decided to take up the task to help as many people as I can, create one. Incase you are skimming over the content, this article is teaching you “How to create a blogger / blogspot theme“

To create a blogger template, you will need a graphic editor (Such as Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint will do) to create images for backgrounds, post headers, sidebars, etc.. We will get to that later. You will also need an idea or vision about what you want to create. Without that, you are just wasting your time and electricity. Lastly, you will need to know about C.S.S (Cascading.Style.Sheets) and how to operate them. If you do not know how to do that, you cannot apply interesting effects to your newly designed template (Such as: Positioning pictures or text, creating repeated backgrounds, moving around pictures and text and more). A great guide on how to get started with this is available here.

Once you have got everything you need, you should start the C.S.S Framework by putting properties such as

body[ background-color: #000000; margin: 0 auto; font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;}

#title [ font-size: 32px; color: #000011; }

so-on and so forth. A basic list of these tags that were taken from Blogger’s simple white theme are available here: (PDF File) XML Tags Blogger List Of CSS. An easier way to do this would be to find a theme that you like and copy and paste the C.S.S, editing it along the way so that time is saved. The only problem with doing that is that every theme is engineered differently so the tags will change.

After configuring your CSS Stylesheet, you must piece it together in HTML. This can be achieved using similar structures.

<div id=’main-wrapper’> <b:section class=’main’ id=’main’ showaddelement=’no’> <b:widget id=‘Blog1′ locked=‘true’ title=’Blog Posts’ type=Blog’/> </b:section> </div>

Do not forget to reference blogger templates that have already been created for the required widgets that you are supposed to put in certain spots. Without doing this, you could not complete making your own template.

Now comes the grueling part that you can either do yourself which could take hours to finish, or copy from another site and edit accordingly. Blogger is configured using widgets. All your posts are just one big widget hence the code up there. An Example of the code that you could type yourself or copy is:

<div class=’post-footer’>
<p class=’post-footer-line post-footer-line-1′><span class=’post-author’>
<b:if cond=’data:top.showAuthor’>
<data:top.authorLabel/> <data:post.author/>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-timestamp’>
<b:if cond=’data:top.showTimestamp’>
<data:top.timestampLabel/>
<b:if cond=’data:post.url’>
<a class=’timestamp-link’ expr:href=’data:post.url’ title=’permanent link’><data:post.timestamp/></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-comment-link’>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType != “item”‘>

<b:if cond=’data:post.allowComments’>
<a class=’comment-link’ expr:href=’data:post.addCommentUrl’ expr:onclick=’data:post.addCommentOnclick’><b:if cond=’data:post.numComments == 1′>1 <data:top.commentLabel/><b:else/><data:post.numComments/> <data:top.commentLabelPlural/></b:if></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-icons’>
<!– email post links –>
<b:if cond=’data:post.emailPostUrl’>
<span class=’item-action’>
<a expr:href=’data:post.emailPostUrl’ expr:title=’data:top.emailPostMsg’>
<span class=’email-post-icon’> </span>
</a>
</span>
</b:if>

<!– quickedit pencil –>
<b:include data=’post’ name=’postQuickEdit’/>
</span> </p>

<p class=’post-footer-line post-footer-line-2′><span class=’post-labels’>
<b:if cond=’data:post.labels’>
<data:postLabelsLabel/>
<b:loop values=’data:post.labels’ var=’label’>
<a expr:href=’data:label.url’ rel=’tag’><data:label.name/></a><b:if cond=’data:label.isLast != “true”‘>,</b:if>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</span> </p>

That code translated into human terms controls what goes at the bottom of every post…In this case its the author, time, comment link and labels. To extract the code from other templates, just click the “Expand Widget Templates” button and it is below the stylesheet on a certain template.

Most of creating a template is just trial and error. If you look at the code and try to piece it together bit by bit.. you will eventually succeed and reap the rewards of creating one. I hope this tutorial has covered everything that you will need and comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated as it would be great if this tutorial would become a one-stop source for all of the Blogger CMS(Content Management System) users.

About the Author

This post was created by Brad. This article is from Brad Blogging.com, which is also where he blogs about tips to make your blog better, through personal experience. If you run a blog, or will be considering about creating one in the future, this blog may be the ultimate resource for you to achieve maximum success!!

BlogBoy Notes:To me everything looked quite sound, but I am not expert on blogger or BlogSpot so make sure you back up your current themes and templates.

]]> http://bradtheblogboy.com/wordpress-2/theme/bloggerblogspot-themes/feed/ 23 http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/permalinks/permalinks/?source=rss http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/permalinks/permalinks/#comments Sat, 19 Apr 2008 03:29:34 +0000 Blogboy http://bradtheblogboy.com/?p=57 Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Permalinks for those of you who don’t know are just what they sound like, permanent links to everything in your blog. The WordPress default, which I have temporarily reverted too, looks something like this http://domain.com/?p=123. Prettier examples look like http://domain.com/2008/04/18/sample-post/ or http://domain.com/category/sample-post/ There are however problems when making this switch on occasion as I am finding out again. Just because your post time works doesn’t mean everything else is working fine and dandy, so be very careful how to change things and test everything.

If anyone has plugin suggestions or comments to restore my pretty permalinks now would be the time to feel superior and hand over that knowledge to BlogBoy. In light of that there will be a thorough post on permalink plugins once I get everything figured out on my own.

WordPress Permalink Documentation

Yeah right, not if you are talking about a blogging god. The one thing Bloggers need to do is realize that they have readers who want to see something new out of them every day. Frankly that is also the quickest way to burn out as a blogger, especially for those of us managing multiple blogs. There are a few tips though that will help reduce the stress.

• Write posts ahead of time either for scheduled publication or keep them around in draft form until they are either finished or you need to pull something out of your ass.
• Make a schedule of posts and keep to it, it is even better if you post it somewhere on your blog so when you get a few nasty emails wondering where your daily blog post is you can point to it. Yes it does happen, in fact that is why I am writing this damned list now. I was tired and needed a day off yesterday and I too it from this blog. One of these days I will manage to take one off from all three at the same time.
• Make a quick post about anything relevant. Don’t make it a crap post, or it isn’t worth your time to even do and you will suffer from it in the long run.
• Make sure you have some great links to provide and tell your readers why they should go read these other people’s blog too.
• Remember even Blogging Gods have bad days and don’t post everyday.

In honor of the suggestion here are my favorite blogging links of the day.

• From Jamie Harrop 20 Ways To Get More Blog Comments. It is a good little list and everyone should be bookmarking it.
• Courtney Tuttle gives us6 Steps To Overcoming A Blog Traffic Slump If you aren’t reading her blog regularly you are missing some really good insight.
• Dosh Dosh:Building a Popular Social Media Profile: Seven Essential Characteristics

We could all stand to do better with this one.

• Darren talks about the new breed of bloggers who are getting into blogging for the express purpose of making money. Making Money as a Side Effect of Blogging (and a New Breed of Blogger) He also gives us a good link over to Seth Godin on how to write like a blogger from a few days ago. Write like a blogger