LS Blogs, the blog directory and search engines very own blog.

After the ongoing trouble with the VPS and disk space, we have moved over to a dedicated server.

The move has just been completed, there may be teething troubles so please let us know if you have any problems, we will be testing things to see how the move went, and fixing any issues as we find them.

Submissions are now back on line as normal.

The server move has *not* taken place yet, despite it being supposed to occur sometime yesterday. Stayed up all night into the early hours of the morning, for nothing…

Sent them a email, asking what is going on, but no reply as yet…

They probably dont have anyone working their at the weekend that can answer the question properly.. although they say the support is open 24/7..

All I want is what I paid for… Godaddy, are you listening?

We should be moving to a new server shortly, so blog submissions are on a temporary hold, until the move is complete, to avoid any difficulties with the move.

This is only a temporary measure to ensure no submissions are lost during the move.

Once we are on the new server, submissions will be re-activated.

A move to add the available feeds from blogs that are listed in the blog directory is now completed.

All blogs that we found a feed for have had the feed added to the more details page, and the posts from those feeds are now being read and included in our search results.

A small number of them will have problems, where we cant read them, but we will be sorting those out in due course where we can.

This move, which has resulted in over 1500 feeds being added has substantially increased the visibility of those blogs which previously did not have their feed indexed. It has also improved the directory as more blogs have more details available for users to view.

As many of the categories are growing quite large, futher categorisation is required.

Today, a new category, Law, Legal and Lawyer Blogs has been introduced.

As we already had many blogs that fitted this category, the process of moving them into the category has begun, with a couple of pages worth of blogs already moved.

Over the next few days, other blogs that are already listed that fit this category will be moved where appropriate.

Submissions for blogs covering the law, legal issues, or from law firms, lawyers etc can now be submitted to this category, instead of less suitable categories such as reference or business.

After giving the new urls a thorough test, I discovered a couple of problems which are now corrected. The problem revolved around the pagee results, and 404 error handling also.

Easy fixes, so lets see how things go for now.

PS - I know the new 404 page for the directory is in bad shape, I need to tidy it up, make it more interesting, and useful, but it serves the purpose for now

At long last I have managed to set aside a little time to work on the URL’s for the site.

As you can see, many of the urls are not really human friendly, relying on numeric parameters instead of readable words.

I did have a few categories with friendly urls, but I never really got around to implementing a proper solution.

Thats changed now, and I have started the process of moving to friendlier urls.

As its a big change, I am only doing a few to start with, to make sure there are no unexpected problems, and as long as all goes well, I will continue to slowly change the other categories over time.

I am redirecting (with a 301 redirect) so anyone who has a link to the old style url will be redirected to the new url without any effort needed on their part (so no need to update any of your links to lsblogs, we are handling it all this end).

As well as this change, I have continued with the cleanup, and deleted more parked/dead/never updated blogs, added feeds to quite a few blogs, and corrected details of some blogs where appropriate.

And finally, at some point in the near future the site will be migrated to a new server, which may possibly involve a (small) amount of downtime, I will post more nearer the event.

As well as continuing with the ever ongoing task of keeping the directory free from link-rot, I have fixed a few minor problems with international characters, and the displaying of some feeds on the more details pages for certain blogs.

A few small changes to the site have also been made (such as not showing the sort by options when there are insufficent blogs in a category to make sorting worthwile), I will be doing more things like this in the future as time permits.

There has also been a few new subcategories added , and we will continue to add categories where appropriate over time, in order to better categorise the listings, and reduce the amount of pages users have to look through to find what they are looking for. Existing listings that have been found to be suitable for those new categories have been moved into them, and we will continue to look out for others to move where appropriate.

A second run through the listings has identified another set of blogs that have now been deleted from the Blog directory.

Many of these fell into either sites that had been wiped clean, and reverted to the default page for whatever service or operating system they are using, the rest were of a more pesky nature.

By pesky, I mean when the blogs in question were originally submitted, they would have contained genuine content, then at some point after acceptance, the contents were removed and replaced with ‘generated’ content.

The generated content is designed so that it could appear to be a English language document, with keywords inserted on a fairly regular basis. However, it is just garbage really, sentences merged together at random via software.

A few other blogs that had not been updated for years were also removed, and more sites that had moved have had their details updated.

First stage of another mass cleanup completed the other day, analysed every listed site looking for parked pages, and removed the ones found. As I find different styles of parked pages, I will add them to the cleanup routines to help keep the directory free from these type of pages.

Its not a easy task in some cases, as some are quite inventive in their methods, but procedures are being implemented which will help long term.

Many more blogs have had their feed details corrected, so more posts are being read and indexed for inclusion in the search results now.

And I have also identified quite a few sites that had moved without telling us, and manually searched out their new address to correct their details, or deleted them, if I could not easily find the new details (or the site had just died, with no forwarding address)

As a result of many listings being removed, this will mean the sites that are still going, providing good content may have moved up the list, providing better exposure. It also provides much cleaner search results, and user experience.