azazil.net

It seems as though the Technorati Favorites Exchange has shaken things up a little, since the way stats are displayed for blogs at technorati has changed somewhat recently. At first I thought the favourite count had gone altogether, but it has simply been renamed as fans and moved over to the left sidebar rather than being quoted in the main statistics block. Interestingly, the link count statistics are now eschewed in favour of a nebulous new Authority rank. There’s no explanation of how this number is calculated at the moment, but I’m sure that will come in time.

And now for the big news: I’ve finally crept into the 100 Most Favorited Blogs list. Thank you all for the link love, I’ll go through the list and be sure I have returned faves later today. A key few participants in the exchange are already well above slashdot in the listings, so if we keep going it’s only a matter of time until we edge it out of the list altogether. :-D

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I was busy teaching the first half of a course on Apache Security in Birmingham until Wednesday this week, each day sandwiched between 2 hours of waiting for and sitting on a train at either end of the teaching proper. By the time I’d finally gotten home, taken a shower and had some dinner, I barely had time to catch an hour of TV in bed before falling asleep. When I came to check Azazil this morning, I was amazed to see almost 3400 spam comments awaiting moderation, and spent a tedious couple of hours trawling through them all to make sure I didn’t accidentally delete any genuine comments from readers taking part in my Technorati Favourites Exchange, and liberated half a dozen of those before expunging the rest of the spam.

By the time I’d finished that exercise, another 60 or so had already piled up so I’ve decided to try out a challenge plugin for readers that comment without logging in. Since I’ve turned off the requirement to login for comment posting, I’ve been receiving far more comments (more than none isn’t tough to beat!) so I certainly don’t want to do that again. From here on in, you’ll either need to correctly answer the question “What year is it?”, or else register and accept the cookie that keeps you logged in on subsequent visits.

Now that I’m getting a reasonable number of comments, I’ve decided to turn the Show Top Commentators plugin back on too, so that regular commentators to the site are rewarded with a full link back to their site. For now, it shows comments for the whole year, but I’ll start resetting it monthly before too long.

If you find the challenge plugin annoying, or can suggest an alternative spam control plugin, please let me know in the comments.

Happily, the folks at Technorati have resolved the issue with my stats not updating, and I’m amazed at the progress I’ve made during the 3 days they were stuck. Not only that, but it appears that my links are being counted correctly now too, and they’ve resolved the problems I complained of in this post with some of my posts being counted as if they were separate blogs.

Despite the apparent drop in links due to newly correct accounting, the favourites exchange is forging ahead exponentially now. Since the last update I’ve been favourited by another 48 blogs, leaving me with only another 20 to get before I hit the Technorati 100 Most Favorite Blogs list! Most of the participants in the scheme are also exchanging links, so I’ve gained more than 50,000 more places in the popularity stakes, bringing me suprisingly close to the being in the top 50,000. Considering that a little over a week ago this blog wasn’t even in the top quarter million most popular blogs, joining the exchange scheme has been the best thing I ever did.

If you’re not taking part yet, and you would like to get some easy exposure for your blog, follow the instructions in my original post to get on board!

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Thanks to the enormous success of the ongoing Technorati Favorites Exchange programs that have been sweeping across the blogosphere for the last week, not only have I increased the number of people who have put azazil.net in their technorati favorites list by almost 400%, I’ve also picked up an enormous number of backlinks. As a pleasant side effect, that has meant my overall ranking has climbed almost 150,000 places! The exchange schemes are already very well established at dozens of sites, and with only a few hours spent clicking through the lists of blogs in the comments of the sites that I’ve listed in my original post, your blog can also be climbing the rankings in a similar fashion!

Some of the participating sites have broken into the technorati 100 most favorite blogs list already, which has raised the number of favs required to get on the list to 123 when I last checked. But the exchange is gaining momentum every day as more people join in, so I’m hoping to make the top 100 list myself in another week or so.

It does appear that Technorati is having some issues at the moment, possibly in part, because of the current wave of favouriting. As a result the overall rank of my site has been stuck for the last 24 hours despite a continuing influx of backlinks. Hopefully, Technorati will pick up my support request soon and I’ll start climbing the ranks again.

In the mean time, if you have a blog, and you haven’t started exchanging favourites yet: What are you waiting for?

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So, last night I got back from my first (deliberate) weekend away from an internet connection in almost a year, to find not only had the whole Technorati Fave Exchange post I made a few days before gone completely wild, but that I’ve received my first blog meme tag from both Bill Toome, and Ian Hedges! Thank you both for the tag guys, and here are the 5 top reasons why I blog:

1. Catharsis: aka learn by teaching; that is, often when I’m wrestling with a problem (social or technical), or just peeved at the universe for being so lame today, I get a lot of mileage out of writing out my thoughts, and then editing the resulting stream of consciousness into a coherent whole. Often, by the time I’ve finished an article on something I was struggling with, I have a deeper understanding of my own point-of-view on the matter and can let go of much of the tension it was creating.
2. Meet like-minded people: Working from home is a lonely way of life, with no cow-orkers to trade anecdotes with, no car pools to share in, and no social gatherings of like minded individuals. Blogging is a community building exercise in many ways, and in time groups of us with similar outlooks will congregate in the comments on one anothers’ blogs. It’s how I get to trade punches with my peers without sitting in traffic to the office every day, and having to agree with my boss because he pays my wages not because he’s right ;-)
3. Freedom of Information: It’s a consciousness raising thing. Without a diversity of opinions to share in and disagree with, how can society learn to ignore the establishment, and instead reach their own conclusions by research and skeptical questioning? Equally, if I’ve pieced together the solution to a problem that someone else may be fighting with, I can post it on my blog to save them working from first principles. Hopefully, the time they save will sometimes be spent working on something that benefits me in the long run.
4. Online Presence: Professionally, I am defined by my online presence. IT in the 21st century is driven by the internet. We make business contacts, we buy, assemble, combine and ultimately resell information over the wire. My blog is me as far as people who might want to do business with me from the other side of the planet are concerned.
5. Documentation: My memory is terrible. I write everything down. And I really do mean everything (GTD was designed especially for me!). I hope my grandchildren will enjoy reading about my adventures along Route 66 in thirty years time, as much as I will enjoy jogging my own memory in thirty days ;-)

Having got that off my chest, I hereby tag:

1. Octavia at Lunarian Art, for being beautiful
2. Alex at Alex Shalman, for being inspirational edit: Alex already took part
   Elisabeth at EJCooksey, for being in the mybloglog widget at half of the blogs I frequent
3. Dragos at Edragonu dot Ro, for being on the same wavelength
4. Maia at Manila Mom, for being where I am heading in the Autumn
5. Frank at Tux Deluxe, for being prolific

There is an interactive tracker for the Why I Blog meme at soloseo.com if you’d like to see who else has participated.