TopOfBlogs Official Blog

To celebrate our anniversary we have just launched our Official Feedback Forum. We are so thankful to our members for helping us grow and improve during our first year. We have received and implemented many of your suggestions, so this forum is an extension of our commitment to listen to our members. The feedback forum is located at http://feedback.topofblogs.com/

Send us your suggestions and your blog could be featured on the homepage for a whole month! During the next 3 months, until the end of the year, we will monthly award the user that had the best suggestion – ranked by the number of votes – and feature their blog on our homepage for one month.

Thank you for being a part of our community and we are looking forward to your suggestions,
- TopOfBlogs Team
Vote for new features at http://feedback.topofblogs.com/

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.

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:

• if you prefer you can show the image that is presenting your current rank inside your main category. This will visualy show your visitators the rank your blog has among other similar blogs in the same niche.
• while if you prefer, you can now hide this image, and still benefit from tracking your blog correctly. This was done for people that didn’t wanted a new graphic design to mess with their blog layout, or just prefer to not show the rank they have on their blogs.

We have just released a new version of our site that includes the most requested feature: a search box. Before, you could find blogs based on the general top, their category or their tags. Still, with the number of blogs growing every day a search box was really needed.

You can now use the top search box to find blogs, based on their name, description, or tags inside the whole directory. The results are sorted by the general rankings, meaning you will always see the ‘best’ blogs first.

If you have any suggestions for us, please use the contact form, and, as you can see we are working to implement all of your good ideas, to bring TopOfBlogs one step closer to our goal: to become the best top of blogs directory.

When we started, we were using thumbshots.org, which seemed to be the best solution for our thumbs (and not to mention it was free). After a few months we realized that this has some limitations:

• fixed size of the thumbs,
• the thumb was taken a long time ago (maybe even years ago, depending on the age of the domain) and no longer accurately represents the image of the site.

We wanted to have something that shows users a recent quick look of how the blogs look rather than an archaic one. Also we wanted to make it easy for our members to easily refresh their own thumbs at anytime.

We found the perfect solution for our needs in Bluga.net WebThumb, a service that had all the requirements we needed and much more. This is not a free service, but we believe it is worth the money. As of today we have launched all the thumbs with the new format. Each blog has saved several sizes of its thumb and they can be seen on different parts of our site already (medium – blog rankings, large – sitedetails, etc.). We will add shortly the ability for members to refresh their own thumbs.

I hope you like this new feature as much as we do. We are looking forward to additional features very soon.