Blogged.my’s automatic language detection
Blogged.my’s automatic language detection wasn’t working properly for the last couple of days due to some unnoticed API changes.
Users are advised to check their pings and to correct any inappropriately selected language if applicable.
We would like to apologise for the inconvenience and the delay in rectification is regretted.
Blogged.my in the clouds!
It’s 2012 and Blogged.my ushered in the New Year with a new server courtesy of the great folks at Exabytes!
We’re now hosted on their brand new flexi cloud nodes which will enable us to easily scale up along with our steadily increasing number of users.
We now have at our disposal a much more powerful system which will enable us the flexibility to introduce more new features to Blogged.my with improved speed, which most of our users will notice.
Do look forward to exciting new features coming your way in 2012! Have a great New Year everyone!
Blogged.my’s new Like/Dislike Buttons
Over the last couple of months, Blogged.my has received numerous upgrades and optimisations, delivering faster pages and working more efficiently. These are behind the scenes upgrades which may not be noticeable to our average users.
Today, we’re rolling out a brand new feature to all our users; Blogged.my’s new ‘Like’ buttons! You’ll find this on each and every ping throughout the site.
Clicking on these buttons will influence the ping’s ranking, giving you the ability to ‘vote’ for your favourite notable pings.
Have fun voting !
Blogged.my server outage
Blogged.my was down for a good part of the day today due to an outage from our server. No, we weren’t hacked or attacked in any other way.
We took this opportunity to migrate Blogged.my to another server, equipped with the latest hardware for better performance.
Sorry for this inconvenience and for missing out on today’s latest blog pings.
Blogged.my’s new language filter!
For those who wanted to read pings in English or Malay, there’s a new feature that’s being introduced to Blogged.my, our new language filter!
On the top right corner of every page there’s a new selection tab “Show pings in: English | Malay | All” where you can select your preferred language. Only English & Malay is supported at the moment unless there’s sufficient demand for other languages.
Each ping will be automatically categorised to its respective language by our automated language detector. However, it might make some mistakes, so we’ll let ping owners to correct this. To change a ping’s language, go to ‘My Blogs’ and change the language in the ‘My Pings’ section.
Happy blog surfing in your favourite language!
Blog shops, seriously?
We do know that Blogged.my is a great platform to promote a blog and to drive traffic, what more traffic that can potentially generate revenue. Blogged.my welcomes all sorts of blogs to ping, with the exception of a few, namely spam blogs, and illegal downloads.
Then we come to blog shops, which we explicitly state that we do not allow. Why so? It’s very simple. Blogged.my was designed to be a place for people to discover good blog posts to read. Blog shops will destroy this experience by endlessly pinging their merchandise, leaving Blogged.my nothing more than a list of advertisements. If our audiences don’t find anything worthwhile to read, they will look elsewhere. We do not want that to happen.
However, if you’re a blog shop owner and would like to reach out to Blogged.my’s audiences, we’ll give you the option of paid banner advertising. It’s a win-win situation where you’ll get the exposure that you’ll need, you’ll help us to pay our server bills to keep Blogged.my running, and our readers will be happy as the ping list is free of spam.
Fair deal?
Blogged.my’s BloggedBar
You may have noticed the new “BloggedBar” whenever you visit a ping from Blogged.my, it’s the bar at the top of the site that you’re visiting with a couple of buttons on it!
We think that’s a logical place to locate the bookmark and flag buttons, providing an easy link back to Blogged.my whenever you’re visiting a ping.
However, if you prefer to view pings without BloggedBar, you can disable it by going to your ‘Edit Profile’ and uncheck the Enable checkbox for BloggedBar. BloggedBar is enabled by default for all users.
This option if only available to registered and logged in users of course. Unregistered uses will now also face a couple of seconds of delay in redirection before reaching their pings. Yes, this is annoying, but this is to encourage more users to register and log in to curb click frauds. Registered users will be redirected immediately like always.
Abuse at Blogged.my
Three blogs was removed from Blogged.my today after the system flagged them as spam blogs which are nothing more than blogs filled with copied articles which solely exists to display ads.
Please do not add these blogs to Blogged.my!
Pinging more than 20 times an hour with articles with questionable origins will obscure all the other genuine blog entries. This is not fair towards other bloggers who took their time and effort to compose their articles only to be pushed to the bottom of the fresh ping list within minutes with spam.
I’ve always maintained Blogged.my will practice self moderation. But in this extreme case, I will not hesitate to delete and subsequently ban these spam blogs to protect the interest of the community.
TW
Blogged.my update roundup
Some quick updates over the past week:
- Modifications to the way pings are inserted into the database. Should speed things up a little bit.
- Couple of tweaks to the PingRank* system.
- Fixed the presistent login cookie problem.
- Tags in ‘Bookmarked Blogs’ changed to show tags from bookmarked blogs only.
- Updates from BloggedBot* has been discontinued. Blogs not registered by their owners will no longer be shown.
- Code clean-up and some housekeeping.
* PingRank – Blogged.my’s automated ping ranking system, this is used to determine what goes into the top 10 box.
* BloggedBot – You may have seen its pings before, it’s Blogged.my’s automated feed grabber. Was designed to automatically grab feeds from various sources during our development phase (when there was insufficient users). Not required anymore.
How to: Ping Blogged.my automatically with WordPress
Automatic pings to Blogged.my are done via XML-RPC. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to configure WordPress (2.7) to automatically ping Blogged.my whenever you publish a new post.
1. Log in to your WordPress blog.
2. Select “Settings” from the side menu.
3. Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
4. The very last part at the bottom is “Update Services”. Add Blogged.my’s XML-RPC server URL (http://rpc.blogged.my) as a new line. Save Changes. Done.
Remember, you need to register and add your blog to Blogged.my first!
Note: These instructions do not apply to WordPress.com.
