Mike Blonder: Thoughts on Technology, and the Web

Getting a Feed Aggregator like http://www.technorati.com to distribute a blog feed is not as simple as was the case as recently as 6 months ago.

I am in the process of getting Technorati to distribute the feed for this blog. Not only have I had to prove to Technorati that I have, in fact, a Blog that I publish, but I have had to go further and prove that I am the owner of the Blog. I have opted to send them my Technorati Profile in lieu of sending them other information that I found to be confidential.

Worse yet, the cached version of my Blog went back a year ago to a different Blog. The ping feature of Movable Type seems to have fixed this cache issue.

As to Movable Type itself, the documentation on installation is not very helpful. As well, one of the most important features for me, the style of the pages themselves and my ability to easily change them as I require, is not very easy at all. The StyleCatcher application did not work as represented. In fact, for a period of time I lost any style at all for my pages. Thanks to my ISP, I got the issue resolved in fairly quick time once I called into the ISP.

© Mike Blonder, 2006, All Rights Reserved

This blog magnetized zero visitors until I set categories and tags for each entry. Curious that tags and categories would be so critical to blog distribution and so little discussed by blog publishing software vendors.

Consider that this blog is published with Movable Type. I couldn't find anything in the Movable Type documentation that highlighted the importance of tags (and categories) to my objective of getting my blog content distributed online. Only when I googled

movable type documentation tags blog distribution

did I come up with an entry from the Movable Type Developer Documentation dated June 8, 2005 where Brad Choate comments

"Today's "Tags" are yesterday's "Keywords". I'm a big fan of metadata and use it extensively both on and off the net. Being able to reference sets of data using a tag or two is extremely powerful. I'm glad to see services like del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati that are promoting and making use of it as they are."

Yes sir. I wonder how many other folks who want to distribute content online have stumbled around not realizing that setting tags and content for entries is critical.

© Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved