Entries tagged 'blog-la-sphere'

without much attention from me, blog-la-sphere turned four years old last september. traffic has nearly doubled since the last time that i checked. i don’t think the ads on it have paid out in a long time. but i still find the site useful, so on it chugs.

i spent a few hours adding a real submission page to blog-la-sphere, to help streamline the process of blogs getting added. and so i could shut down another email address that was mostly a spam magnet.

you can’t see it now, but there will be a list in the top of the middle column showing any blogs that have been added within the last week. the middle column also shows posts from the last 24 hours, rather than posts from the last month and a half.

finally, i dialed down the frequency that sites are checked for updates if they haven’t updated recently. if a blog hasn’t been updated in more than a week, it will now only get checked daily. if it has been more than three months, it will only get checked once a week.

it was just over a year ago that i scooped up the domains based on mike’s silly blog-la-sphere neologism and launched something like the old lablogs.com. after a brief spike of 172 daily visitors shortly after launch (probably after being linked by la observed), it has settled into an average of about a dozen visitors a day. the total take from the google adsense on the site has been $6.12.

thankfully, the site is pretty much on auto-pilot now, except i occasionally add new blogs to the list when i notice them mentioned somewhere. and i sometimes get emails from not-very-clueful public relations people about how to get an event listed.

i finally dealt with the layout problems on blog-la-sphere that showed up with internet explorer, so the blogroll no longer stomps all over the posts and photos.

next i need to re-write the “about” page so that people can learn what the heck is going on, and how the photos and posts are chosen for the front page. (summary: not by human hands.)

i think the layout i planned worked better in my head than in implementation, so i’ll probably re-think it sooner rather than later. but at least there’s always fresh content up there, as opposed to the blog i rarely updated.

it’s still a little rough around the edges, particularly with layout problems on internet explorer, but i’ve put up the new blog-la-sphere front page that i’ve been working on.

the content is automatically mined from all of the blogs listed in the blog-la-sphere, and the pictures come from either the blog-la-sphere pool on flickr, or appropriately licensed pictures from a search on ‘los angeles’ on flickr.

since blo.gs appears to have finally given up the ghost on monday, and the quality of its update information was deteriorating before that, so i have finally gone and implemented my own crawler to figure out update times for the sites i still care about.

it shares a bit of code with the crawler for blog-la-sphere.

i have had it in the back of my head to implement something that works more or less like blo.gs did. but first i have a wedding to enjoy.

i had an idea for a new feature to add to blog-la-sphere: by looking at what people in the blog-la-sphere are linking to, generate a list of the most-blogged-about items. the problem i ran into is that once i pulled out all the links, it turns out that the most-linked-to story in the last month only got five links. the rest of the top five only got two.

the “buzziest” story was michael richard’s tirade at the laugh factory.

the idea was inspired by sam ruby’s mememe implementation, but i didn’t push things nearly as far along because of the low number of blog-la-sphere memes.

it’s been a little over a month since it launched, so i guess a report on blog-la-sphere is appropriate: 1,049 visits, about 15 average daily visitors, $1.47 in google adsense revenue. i’ve added about 150 new blogs since the launch, and posted a dozen times.

over at franklin avenue, mike coined the ridiculous term blog-la-sphere and a few misguided domain-name look-ups later, i ended up registering blog-la-sphere.com (and variants). now i’m proud to launch blog-la-sphere. or relieved. or mildly amused. or maybe i just ate something bad for breakfast.