RSS Feed Autodiscovery

Posted on June 2, 2008
Filed Under Development, General, TopBlogs | Leave a Comment

The most common problem people have submitting their blog to our system is not having a proper RSS feed.. The TopOfBlogs crawler will verify several things in order to ensure that you are submitting a blog and not a regular site and having a proper rss feed is just a basic thing for any type of blogging platform. Still, even if your blog has a feed and it is included somewhere on the front page, it might be very hard for our crawler to find it.

In order for our system, or any aggregator (also applies to your visitors clickig on the RSS icon in their browser’s URL field)  to crawl your site you should ensure that you are advertising your feed. For this you just need to have in your head section of your HTML page (blog template) a line like:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="/feed/" />
(where obviously you will have your own feed url), or depending on your feed type, for atom:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="/feed/atom/" />

If you have multiple feeds you can just specify multiple lines.

These links will enable RSS autodiscovery and it will allow browsers and aggregators to automatically detect your rss feed, and make it easier to subscribe in general.

Conclusion: if your submission to TopOfBlogs is failing be sure to check that you make your blog feed discoverable to our robot and other systems to help you get a better exposure for your blog.

Different Sorting Methods

Posted on May 1, 2008
Filed Under Announcements | Leave a Comment

For quite some time, our users have asked for the ability to sort blogs using different criteria. Today we launched a new feature that  will allow you to sort the blogs based on:

and of course on all these, you can apply the Country or Language filters.

As always your feedback is welcomed, so feel free to send us your suggestions, ideas, bug reports, or comments at any time.

FeedCount

Posted on April 7, 2008
Filed Under Announcements, News, TopBlogs | Leave a Comment

As many of you have noticed already we have rolled out a cool new feature: feedcount. Since many people are reading blogs using a rss reader, comparing blogs only on pageviews is not at all accurate. So we added to our system another metric starting today, and this is the feedcount. It works for any feedburner feed that has the awareness api public (the default) and we update this value daily (as provided by feedburner) .

This value is added to the pageviews and counts in our global ranking. For blogs that don’t have a feedburner feed we are unable to get this metric and we would really suggest that you get your rss feed from feedburner.  It is free and has many other cool features.

Note: if you want to change your existing feed on your topofblogs listing you can do this from your account (using any of the automatically advertised feeds on your blog).

I hope you will enjoy this new feature and we are looking forward for your feedback and suggestions on how we can improve topofblogs even more.

Manual Verification of all Submissions

Posted on March 3, 2008
Filed Under Announcements | Leave a Comment

The moment when we realized that we have to stop open submissions was a sad moment for us. From day one, our main concern was to have the submission process as simple as possible. We were naive enough to believe that people will read our terms of service and not add blogs that should not be allowed in our directory. Unfortunately this was not true. And with more and more blogs being added everyday this got worse and worse.

This being said, we are forced to introduce the manual verification step, and starting today all blogs will be verified by our editors. If one blog is found to be outside our terms of service, it will be suspend and completely ignore any other submissions for that particular blog url. While if the blog is accepted the user will receive the email notification and can start using our system right away.
Even though he have a high number of daily submissions we are trying to process every submission in maximum two business days (normally this is much shorter - like a couple of hours).

For bloggers the process should be the same as before. Our crawler tries to do its best and make it as easy as possible to submit your blog. If you are confident that your blog is ’safe’ and not breaking any of our terms of services you can even add you tracking code immediately. If you have any concerns, we would suggest you to wait for the email notification (sent only on accepted blogs).

This action should ensure that only quality blogs are accepted in our toplist directory and this should be beneficial for both bloggers and also the general users browsing our site.

Transparent Image

Posted on February 26, 2008
Filed Under News | 1 Comment

Starting today you can choose to no longer show the topofblogs tracking image on your blog. If you prefer, you can set this to a transparent image and it will no longer appear on your blog, while still tracking all your pageviews. This appears as a new choice at registration, but you can use if also for any registered blogs. Just go to your account and for the blog you want to do this, select the transparent image option, and then get your new html code and update it on your blog.

We have launched this new feature, that is quite unique amongst similar sites to our knowledge, in order for our members to be able to choose their preferred method:

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