Today I found a fellow Technorati skeptic, who is also trying to increase the visibility of his blog. In his blog post titled "Blog tips to get your posts seen by more people," he states that he hasn't had much luck with Technorati so far, and wonders how to "get some authority" (i.e., increase the Technorati authority value of his site). This authority value is based on the number of other blogs on Technorati that have referenced your blog.

Having signed up to Technorati, Zimbio and Blogged, my goal is to examine how effective each of these are in bringing traffic to this blog/site. At least one of these three sites has brought in a few visitors to the blog post titled: "A Skeptic's View of Technorati and Zimbio." These visits came either from mail.google.com (i.e., links from someone's inbox), or were marked as direct links. The direct links are most likely from email clients too. Thus, I have no idea which of the three blog directories/search-engines sent the emails containing the links. 

 ... courtesy of blogged.com. This morning I thought that I would have to revise my hypothesis regarding Technorati making it almost impossible for new blogs to get any exposure. This blog received a single visit from Technorati. However, looking at the URL showed that blogged.com had a lot to do with this visit. The referring URL was:

Since signing up to both Technorati and Zimbio yesterday, my skepticism has not decreased regarding how helpful these sites are likely to be for promoting new blogs. Both operate in very different manners, but neither appears to give much space for new blogs. Let us have a look at both sites, what they offer, and what the issues are.

Given the millions upon millions of blogs in existence, and the thousands of new ones starting every day, some sort of directory or search-engine for blogs would make sense. Unfortunately, it appears that all too many people agree. A quick search for blog directory or blog search engine brings a mind-blowing number of hits. There is as big an overdose of blog directories and search-engines as there are blogs. This is probably fueled by reports that some people have made money off their blogs; the smell of money to be made bringing in plenty of entrepreneurs.

Following up from one of the previous blog posts, I have deleted all the extra rewrite rules from the .htaccess file, and the CMS operates perfectly. So, here are the installation instructions for anyone wishing to use Silverstripe with kiwihosting.net.nz. These instructions may also solve problems on other hosts.

A new page is up in the projects section. This page is the dumping ground for all worthy ideas for software/gadgets that I have had, which I do not have time to develop myself. Anyone and everyone is welcome to peruse this page, and take what they wish. My only request in return is to receive credit for the idea, should anyone make some of the ideas a reality. I should be updating this page occasionally, whenever I have more good ideas that I wish to give away.

Previously I noticed that the CMS was sometimes prepending additional directories to the URL in links, but was at a loss to explain why. My solution at the time was to add more rewrite rules to the .htaccess file. However, today I noticed that the problem was still there, this time with the blog pages.

I have suspected that Google Analytics hides things it doesn't understand for a few weeks now. Whilst I am not certain about that, it definitely misses some things, and gets others wrong. Let us examine what it misses first. Some old browsers register only the first page visited, and the rest are not counted. This results in Google Analytics marking their visits as "bounces," when these visitors did, in fact, view multiple pages. For example, Mozilla 4 and lower appear to cause this. Other browsers do not even register at all, resulting in uncounted visits. These details were obtained by comparing the results from Google Analytics, to this site's server logs. 

This site has been up for almost an month now. Most of this time has been spent generating content to put online. The initial build of the website was fairly rapid, taking only an evening or two. This is due to how Silverstripe is to use. Some technical issues got in the way (see previous blog posts), but this is a spare-time project, so one cannot expect rapid progress. Nevertheless, a few templates and programming articles are online, along with a page (and gallery) about MiniGL 2.0 for Amiga OS 4.