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In hindsight I should have added your actual position too as this is more meaningful than your score. (A score of 524 doesn’t mean much, but a position in the charts of number 5 is pretty easy to understand!)

I’ve upped the number of blogs on the Top Blogs page to 300, and you can view the history data by clicking on the appropriate ‘history’ links. Next on my to-do list is to add fully paged charts so that you can browse all the blogs in the system, and then to add a search tool so you can easily find your own blog.

If you look at the score histories you can see that some of them are pretty flat. These tend to be the blogs without the tracking code (of the inputs to the score, the traffic data is the most variable, maining it has the most influence on score fluctuations).

Anyway, feedback and constructive criticism is always appreciated so let me know if you have any thoughts.

Tags: technoranki, blog ranks, blog rankings

I seem to have had a few productive days since my holiday began on Thursday afternoon. I spent yesterday trying to track down splogs in Technoranki using SpolgSpot. Sadly, SplogSpot’s database seems to be full of rubbish. Yes, the do have some splogs in it, but they have more than 100 of our valid blogs in their database too (including our very own BritBlog Blog!). I just couldn’t be bothered checking all the ones it threw up as none that I checked were actually splogs.

So after yesterday’s rather failed attmept to locate splogs, I switched my efforts to locating dead and missing blogs in the BritBlog directory. I’ve written a little tool that goes and visits all the blogs in the directory and decides if the blog us there or not.

I’m going to run it each day (probably), and if a blog is missing more than 10 times in a row say, I’ll remove it from the database (probably after emailing the owner to tell them).

There is some room for improvement with this: for example I haven’t decided what to do with URL redirects yet. I think I need to sort out the trailing slash issue first, then worry about the remainder of these issues. It’s been a good chance to have a practice with Python though. Seems like a good language, but I’ve got a long way to go

Anyhoo, the tool seems to be doing it’s job so I’ll bolt it into the live application over the next few days. Will be good to remove some of the deadwood from the directory. That remonds me, the spider is running silently in the background. There’s a lot of work to do before it can go live, but it should be another useful tool in the battle to purge dead blogs from the directory.

Right, can’t sit up all night — I don’t want to scare off Santa!

Merry Christmas!

Tags: splogs, splogspot, santa, christmas

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I think I’ve always been quite open about the fact that technoranki is experimental, and that there will be bugs and glitches with it from time to time. I’ve also been totally against explaining how the algorithm works in detail in order to prevent people cheating and abusing the system. I understand this can cause frustrations for people who want to understand why their blog has a certain rank and why another blog is better than theirs, but I still think it is for the best.

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The website monitoring service that I use also alerts me by SMS and EMail when the web sites die, or if they fail to respond in the expected fashion. This has been particularly handy for BritBlog which runs on a rather temperamental server!

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