Blog charts coming back in house

The Blog Ranking service, Technoranki, is going to be brought back in house and reflect only ‘top’ British blogs. I’m taking this move to free up more time for BritBlog, which is really the site I need to focus most attention.

As Technoranki never opened up its doors to none-BritBlog members this shouldn’t cause any issues. It will make management of the blogs much easier (as I won’t have to track spam blogs in two places), and it will mean the problem of getting new blogs added to Technoranki will be gone.

It also means that the charts will only reflect British Blogs, which has to make it of more interest to all our members!

This change will take time to plan and implement, so keep an eye out for updates here. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to leave a comment below or drop me an email.

» Full announcement and more details.

Technoranki Peer Group

A peer group is being formed to work on improving the technoranki blog ranks algorithm. If you’d like to get involved you need to be nominated (self nominations are allowed) and seconded by someone else.
[tags]technoranki,blog ranking,peer group[/tags]

Blog ranks update

It’s been a long time coming, but the Technoranki blog ranking system is nearly back up and running again.

Everything has been moved onto a new server, but there will be a few odd things happening over the next week or so as the DNS is updated and the ranking system catches up with itself.

It will take a while for technoranki to get up to speed (it needs at least a week’s worth of traffic data), so please bear with us while this happens.

All BritBlog members who were listed in the directory as of yesterday have now been entered into the technoranki system. New members will be added automatically in due course.

Once technoranki is running properly again then BritBlog can start getting blog ranks back out of it, and the Top of the Blogs chart can start being updated again.

So I think we’re looking at about two weeks for everything to be up and running properly.

Finally, because technoranki isn’t really anything to do with BritBlog (it’s a totally separate project) I’m also going to start a technoranki category over in my own blog. I’ll publish any information about technoranki over there from now on.
[tags]technoranki,blogging,blog ranks[/tags]

Blog ranking update

Another quick update, this time on the blog ranks front: I’ve ordered the server mounting rails today, so they should be with me by the end of the week. With luck I’ll be able to arrange some time next week to get the new server installed (up at Sovereign House), so that should mean I can get the blog ranking service back up and running within a few weeks of that. Yay!

For those of you that aren’t aware of the situation, I had to disable everything to do with the blog ranking system (technoranki) a few months ago (time flies!). The load that technoranki was creating on our existing server was too much, and it kept killing our web server (the one that runs BritBlog).

So, once this new box goes in I can move all the technoranki stuff on to that, as well as a few other little bits to do with BritBlog. This means that the ranking process can begin again, and BritBlog can start syncing with technoranki once more. It will also give us a better environment for building the new version of BritBlog — at last!

So things are finally moving in the right direction again, and I for one am getting quite excited about some of the new services we can bring online. All of a sudden it doesn’t seem so far away

Anyway, sorry about the problems we’ve had with technoranki. I’ve had loads of emails asking what is going on with this stuff, so I hope that answers your questions. I will, of course, let you all know when technoranki is back up and running fully again.

[tags]britblog,technoranki,blog ranks,blog ranking[/tags]

Minor technical issues…

Sorry if any of you were having problems today accessing the site – our server was having a bit of a flap!

There were a few things using up too many resources, so I’ve disabled a few things, including the ping service (which wasn’t for production use anyway), some of the scheduled processes that help keep the site data up-to-date, and the blogranks rank icon generator thingumyjig.

So what does this mean to you? Hopefully not a lot, but the most significant thing you may notice is that your blog rank icons (that you embed in your blog templates) will not be displaying your rank at the moment – it will just show ‘technoranki’ as text. Your traffic will still be tracked though, so this won’t affect the results we calculate.

If you have any concerns (or if you can afford to donate a second web server), please feel free to get in touch.

Technoranki – traffic monitoring update

I’m pleased to announce that Technoranki now uses blog traffic data when calculating blog ranks!

I’ve made some tweaks to the algorithm too, so you should notice the ranking order change quite a bit over the next few days. This process takes a few days because the data in the BritBlog database has to be synchronized with the data in the Technoranki database.

So what next? Well, I’ve got a lot of work to do on the actual Technoranki web site (like add a search tool, add full chart listings, and enable ’self signups’), so I hope to start on this in the next week or so.

If you’re a BritBlog member and want to take part in the ‘Top of the Blogs‘ charts, sign in to your BritBlog account, and grab the Technoranki tracking code for your web site.

If you’re not a BritBlog member but still want to discover what your blog rank is, then please hold on just a little while longer

As always, any comments, suggestions or feedback you may have is greatly appreciated!

Technoranki – traffic monitoring

OK, the traffic portion of the technoranki blog ranking project is basically done. Traffic is being logged and processed, so all that remains is for the results to be actually be incorporated into the final score, and this is a simple matter.

At the moment there is still only a small percentage of bloggers using the code. This is fine (there is no pressure to join the project!), but if you don’t join in then you stand to loose your existing position within the charts. I’ve not set a date for the switch over to the upgraded ranking method. While I’m keen to do this soon, I don’t want to do it while we’ve only got a small number of blogs participating.

So, if you want to take part, please get the code and install it into your blog template. I’m hoping to generate some interesting graphs and reports based on the data we collect too, so the more people that take part the better

Technorati Tags: technoranki, blog ranks

Traffic tracking coming along nicely

Just to keep you updated, the traffic tracking component bit of the technoranki project is coming along nicely.

I’ve got a long car journey (as a pasenger) tomorrow, so will have a good chance to plan and prepare the final stuff. With luck I’ll get it written by Sunday.

However, there aren’t really enough people using the tracking code to make it fair for the results to be used in the blog ranks just yet.

For that reason, could I ask people to mention the technoranki project on their blogs? If you could encourage existing BritBlog members to get the code then that will really speed things along! You could link to this post for more information. Once this is going I’m going to open up the project to non-BritBlog members, so that should help smooth the results out too.

Anyway, any help with getting the word out on this would be greatly appreciated

Technoranki Update

I’ve now set up part of the traffic tracking code for technoranki.

If you are listed in BritBlog, you can now get your tracking code (you must be logged in first).

I probably won’t get a chance to write the traffic-processing code until next weekend now, so this means your traffic data won’t be incorporated into the blog ranks until then. If you can start putting the tracking code on your blogs though it will give me some real data to play with, and this will be really helpful.

If you spot an error, please drop me an email about it, remembering to describe what went wrong and include any error message that may have appeared.

Remember this is all new code, so it hasn’t been properly tested yet. Please bear with us while we get it all working properly

Thanks!

Top of the Blogs – request for comments

Several people have said to me that technoranki should take into account blog traffic as one of the factors used to calculate blog rank. I’m inclined to agree, but have held of this far for two reasons:

1. It would require people to have a tracking image on their site
2. It could put too much load on this server, bringing all the sites down!

I think I may have a fix for point two, so the question is: would people put the tracking images on their sites? To make this kind of measurement a factor in the blog ranks I need a majority to be in favour of it. Using traffic as contributory factor to rank will clearly bias that results in favour of those with the tracking code, so before I do this I’m keen to hear what other people think.

Using tracking images will allow you to display real-time icons of your ‘blog rank’ (like the Google PageRank) on your blog, and this may add an additional interest factor to the service. The icon will be the same size as the current BritBlog icons, so should be easy to integrate with your sites.

So what do people think? Personally I’d like to try this. If the traffic is too much we can always look at getting another server online. If we go ahead with it, I’ll need a bit of time to set it up, and then it will probably take a week or so for the statistics to sort themselves out.