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.
Oops… new link back!
While in the midst of adding new features to Blogged.my, an unfortunate typo error was left unnoticed in the codes thus disabling the ability to add new blogs to the database. This error has since been fixed thanks to an alert from Chubby Zebra. Please try adding your blog again if it didn’t work a couple of days ago.
What’s new you might ask? There’s a couple. One of which is a tag browsing page, which is quite self-explanatory. This can be accessed from the ‘Browse Tags‘ link on the sidebar.
The other new feature is the ‘Recent Referrers’ on the main page sidebar. This aims to reward blogs who link back to Blogged.my. The last 10 recent referrers (in the last 60 minutes) will be displayed here.
To link back, go to your ‘My Blogs’ settings page once logged in and find the new link buttons! Just copy and paste the HTML codes to your blog and you’re good to go. You can also download the images and upload them to your blog for faster loading times. A simple text link to Blogged.my is also appreciated.
Blogged.my’s official blog!
Hello all and welcome to Blogged.my! Check back on this official blog to get the latest news on the development, new features and issues regarding Blogged.my. So let’s get started with some FAQs.
So what is Blogged.my?
Blogged.my is a Malaysian blog ping aggregator which aims to provide a starting point for local blog readers with links to articles written by bloggers with local interests. For blog writers, this is the place to get your blog ‘discovered’.
What makes Blogged.my different from the other local blog aggregators?
Unlike most local Malaysian blog aggregators, Blogged.my runs on its own custom software which is entirely written from the ground up, not just a rough hack of an off-the-shelf solution. The author thought the current breed of aggregators is not suitable to the local scene and decided to write one of his own.
So who is behind Blogged.my?
Me, mostly a blog reader who prefers to let pictures to do the talking. As a community project, I’m taking the hands-off approach towards ping moderation. The community is the one who decides what is appropriate and what is not. So please put the flagging system to good use. I will only interfere in extreme circumstances (abuses, spam, etc).
Comments and suggestions are very much welcomed. After all this is a community project, and the community should have a say. So what say you?
