“Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.” “

So what does this actually mean? I don’t know the full extent of it yet, but I do know that you can set up a free account on their site and add your blog to their database of blogs. The objective of course is to ultimately be noticed by the blogging community on technorati.com and get lots of traffic. This is sort of like google.com, but for blogs.

I just finished registering this blog at technorati.com, wow, I’m only ranked 8,911,336, I wonder how long it takes to move up 100,000 (or rather down 100,000)…

Someone suggested that I also register the blog at blogskinny.com which I promptly did only to find out that in order to get verified, I need to put one of their image / track back code snippets which tie back to an affiliate program that pays them! Am I missing something? Is it worth it to register at blogskinny.com and give them free advertising to be included in their search engine?

Note to self: review and study blog search directories, the good, the bad, the ugly.

This is great and simple enough to use, but if you write a lot of articles on the same topic, then tagging can be a chore. Luckily there’s a great plugin for WordPress that makes tagging less of a chore. You can find it here: Simple Tags. The developer’s website is here: Simple Tags Developer.

Simple Tags offers many options that add value to your articles, in particular, the following are worth mentioning:

1. You can select tags from previously written articles.  This creates a consistent tagging experience for both the writer and the reader.
2. Simple Tags will also suggest tags from Yahoo and the Internet, this is really cool.
3. Simple Tags integrates with the All in One SEO plugin in that certain features are disabled if the All in One SEO plugin is installed.
4. Embedded tagging allows you to write articles and embed tags in the articles, by using the “tagging” element identifiers which are customizable.  This is particularly useful if you’re submitting articles to your blog via e-mail.

There are many more features that we’ll discuss as we develop this blog.

The plugins available for this platform, continue to amaze me in their simplicity, both in installation and usage as well as how much they bring to the table in terms of getting our blogs properly indexed out there.  The latest addition to my plugin arsental is the must have All in One SEO Pack.

I downloaded and installed this plugin tonigh and have already easily configured a variety of the options available through this plugin and the options are teriffic.  From home page title, to meta tag descriptions, it all counts in the quest for rankings.  Below is an image of the options page associated with this plugin:

So I downloaded the gallery, installed it (combined with the image rotation flash file) and activated it.  Turns out that there are definitely a few things that you have to take into consideration when using this gallery:

1. Prepare your images.  The gallery automaically creates thumbnails for uploaded images but there is limited control over those thumbnails.  The initial batch of images that I uploaded contained images of varying shapes and sizes.  This wasn’t done on purpose, it just happened to be the case.  The generated thumbnails were inconsistent with the uploaded images and cropped the images incorrectly.  I tried to no avail to fix the situation within the gallery, even going so far as posting a message on the forum but it just didn’t work.  The solution as it turns out is to make sure that all of the images uploaded to a particular gallery are pre-configured to be of the same size, the gallery seems to prefer 800×600, although, I’m sure it works for other image sizes provided they are the same for any given gallery.  The second set of images that I uploaded were all 800×600 and the thumbnails worked great.
2. Upload your images.  One of the coolest parts of the gallery is that it lets you upload images in a single zip file and the plugin automatically opens up the zip and grabs the images, this makes it really easy to create libraries and push content.
3. The good thing about this plugin is that it offers a lot of options.
4. The bad thing about this plugin is that there is limited documentation and you’re pretty much on your own to try and figure out everything and how it works for you.

Any additional information / comments / tips about this library would be greatly appreciated.

There’s a great article on problogger.net that does a great job at explaining this particular topic. I do need to learn more about them to understand how one gets notified when there’s a trackback as well as if there are any stats about trackbacks that can be quantified and measured. The article can be found here:

Introduction to Trackbacks

Now what? The next step is to let Google know about the existence of the sitemap and its location.  In the Google webmaster tool section (after you’vie activated the free Google webmaster tool suite for your site), you can let Google know about the site’s sitemap.  Click on the “Sitemaps” tab, enter the URL of the sitemap and submit, that’s it.  Google says it will take several hours for their system to recognize the sitemap that has been submitted, that’s ok, there’s more to be done.

A “Sitemap” is defined as by sitemaps.org as:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Wow, this seems pretty important and since I’ve already submitted my site to Google and the “googlebot” is already visiting my site (crawling it) better get this set up ASAP. Luckily since this is a WordPress operation (grin), many plugins (application extensions) are available, including one that automates the “sitemap.xml” file creation process, all I have to do is install it and configure.

The sitemap extension that I have chosen for this site for generating the “sitemap.xml” file is (drum roll):

Google XML Sitemap Generator for Wordpress by arnebrachhold.de

Download the plugin, follow the instructions and it should work.  Probably the most complicated part is to change the permissions per the instructions to allow the plugin to “create / write” the .xml sitemap files.  These are the specific instructions to install and configure this plugin:

1. Upload the full directory into your wp-content/plugins directory
2. Use your favourite FTP program to create two files named sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz and make them writable via CHMOD 666. More information about CHMOD and how to make files writable is available at the [WordPress Codex](http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions) and on [stadtaus.com](http://www.stadtaus.com/en/tutorials/chmod-ftp-file-permissions.php). Making your whole blog directory writable is NOT recommended due to security reasons.
4. Activate the plugin at the plugin administration page
5. Open the plugin configuration page, which is located under Options -> XML-Sitemap and build the sitemap the first time. If you get a permission error, check the file permissions of the newly created files.
6. The plugin will automatically update your sitemap of you publish a post, so theres nothing more to do :)blockquote>

Google Add URL Page

Which allowed me to let Google know that my site is up and running.  I wonder how effective this particular Google page is.  The response Google gave me after I submitted this page is below, unfortunately not very encouraging, but hey, it’s a start.  Also, it tells you to check out the Google Webmaster tools, I’ll be doing that later on to see what they have to offer.

Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

You may also be interested in Google webmaster tools, which shows you Google’s view of your site, helps you diagnose problems, and lets you share information with us to help improve your site’s visibility in our search results

Finally, it came. I’ve been waiting for it for a long while, had a pre-order for months! This the reason I started this blog. All I can say is that it’s awesome. Pictures and a full review coming in a day or so. I’ve got a lot of tinkering to do with it. For those of you that are curious, it’s the Skeletool CX 830849. The 850’s are not out yet… or at least I can’t get them.

What’s there not to love about this tool? It’s small, it’s compact, it’s beautifully designed, a pleasure to hold, to show off and to use. I never thought I’d actually want to carry a multi-purpose tool around, this one is different. It’s got that “cool” and “wow” factor. No longer a strong hold of the handyman, say hello to the multi-purpose tool for the masses.

For starters, the blade, it’s easy to open with one hand, it’s sharp and ready to go. The bottle opener / belt and key chain hook is a great combination. The fact that the extra screw driver bit is hidden inside the Skeletool body frame is genius. How often are you concerned about losing your extra bits? Pictures are below.