Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

You know you are disconnected when:

- You watch everything there is to see on TV.
- You are able to open books from the curriculum at home.
- Yahtzee on your mobile phone is suddenly really interesting.
- There doesn’t seem to be enough Sudoku included in the daily newspapers.

In other words, thanks to old cables and frost, I have been disconnected for almost two weeks. I really didn’t think it could happen in one of the most sophisticated countries in the world, but apparantly it can. So right now I am off to go through the hundred something unread emails that have accumulated during this period, and of course excuse myself to those in charge of the blogs I write for. Trackback.

Image by killermonkeys

Just letting you all know that up until the 12th of December or so, new posts will be more or less sporadic here at Lars-Christian.com. The reason? Exams of course. I have 3 final exams in this period, and because of this I am taking some time off from blogging.

Wish me luck! And of course, good luck to those of you who are in the same position as myself, preparing for your own tests.

While I am by no means the first to voice my concerns over Technorati’s recent demise, I think it is yet again time for someone to point out how they have completely wasted the once so promising position they found themselves in.

Although their services have been everything but fully functional for the past few months, I have continued to go back, hoping that they would soon be restored to their former glory. But now I am officially giving them up, and declaring them dead to me at least. What was once a useful tool for bloggers in order to track the growth and popularity of their blogs, has now been reduced to waste.

Disagree? I present you with a small list of evidence. Granted these are things that could easily be rectified by the Technorati team, but the lack of interest they have shown in the past couple of months for actually doing so, leads me to believe that they have even given up themselves.

• Blog posts are not being indexed properly. While indexing many millions of blogs and what they write about is no small task, a service that gets its bread and butter from doing it, should be able to pride themselves by doing it in a reliable fashion.
• As an extension to this, their whole service is completely unreliable, in particular the search function and the favorites function. The latest posts from my favorites frequently disappear, only to reappear but then not up to date at all.
• Result? WordPress have dropped Technorati when displaying the most recent reactions to your posts, and now uses Google’s Blogsearch (the large keep growing).
• Authority is not being updated at all across the board. Just have a look at this thread in the Technorati Support Forums, which was started a month ago, currently has 32 replies and still no response from the staff.
• Although it has been criticized for being to easy to game, this of course makes the Authority function completely useless, as it no longer reflects any accuracy of a blog’s popularity at all.
• With Authority not being updated, and reactions to your own blog posts not being indexed properly, it is as the headline states, completely useless as a tool for bloggers and keeping track of what happens around their own blog.
• The search function is worthless because posts are not being indexed properly.
• Technorati is now crap, and I will never use it again.

Well that last statement is a tad angry-fanboy-ish, especially seeing how I am avid supporter of Technorati and the services they provide for bloggers. It was an excellent tool for keeping track of the blogosphere, and in particularly staying up to date on the community around your own blog.

I also loved the fact that a simple start-up like Technorati is, was able to get a firm stronghold over this position, compared to the alternative, which is as we are seeing right now, that a giant corporation like Google is taking over another important part of the web. Unfortunately, because of all the problems at Technorati and no end of them in sight, I am now forced to turn to Google with my blog searches as well.

And just to top it off, I give you a screenshot of what the reactions page to this very blog looks like as of now:

Now that is a lot of reaction from many unidentified blogs with no authority at all. Excellent, if the staff over at Technorati keep this up, it will not be long before we have to go the the Internet Archive to be reminded what Technorati used to be!

As I have previously mentioned, I will be looking at ways to monetize this blog in the future. No worries however, I have no plans of making it a full time effort, I simply wish to see if there is any potential income at all in this little piece of internet that I spend some time on.

One thing I have spent some time thinking about in regards to this is paid posts. Earlier I have done a couple of paid posts on this blog, and the question I’ve been pondering is whether or not I should be open to this in the future or not. Generally I have nothing against paid posts, and as long as the readers can be sure that those who buy reviews are paying for a review and not a good / friendly / positive review, there aren’t any problems at all.

What is strikingly obvious when it comes down to it however, is that for this to be the case, it requires a certain amount of trust between the writer and the reader. This would be the kind of trust that is established over months, if not even years of mutual loyalty between a writer and a base of readers. A strong and positive reputation within your target market also helps.

Andy Beard can pull it off, because all the people who read his blog know and believe his intentions and requirements for writing such a post both through his dedication to his blog as well as the community that surrounds it. I myself on the other hand only stand at the starting line when it comes to building this type of credibility, and that is why I with this post want to announce that I will no longer be writing paid posts here at my personal blog.

Like I said above, I have nothing against the idea of paid posts, but this is simply a step I want to take (and a potential source of income I will forsake) because I feel that the possible damages to my own integrity and credibility in the eyes of my readers is far more valuable to me at this point.

Now enough about me, I want to hear from you as well! Do you write paid reviews on your own blog? If so, what is your reasoning behind it? I would love to hear other people’s opinions on this subject, especially to see if I just put too much thought into the whole idea of paid posts versus integrity and perceived credibility.

No groundbreaking post today, just announcing that I’ve made a couple of small changes to the blog’s setup which will hopefully help me improve the amount of traffic I receive from search engines. While I already receive a fair share of traffic, especially from Google, I don’t see any harm in making the blog a little friendlier for the spiders. Of course, as the friendly guy I am, I will be sharing these small tips with my loyal readers!

The first thing I did was setup a redirect from all URLs without the trailing slash (”http://lars-christian.com/catx/posty” now redirects to “http://lars-christian.com/catx/posty/”). This is because internally I use all URLs with the trailing slash, and now if someone links to the URL without it, the blog will serve a 301-redirect to the URL with the trailing slash. This makes sure that any potential link juice won’t be spread over two different pages.

If you want to do this for your own blog or site, you can simply add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[^\.]+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]

Next I added a nifty little plugin called Head META Description. This is handy because it automatically changes the META Description tags on all the pages based on the content of that page. WordPress by default uses the description of your blog as a description on all pages, and I believe this will help increase clickthrough-rates from the search engines, in particular Google which uses the META tag for its description of your search listings.

Another thing I did was to make it so that my archives don’t display full posts, but instead only excerpts with a link to the full post. This is not only much more practical, but it also avoids potential duplicate content penalties from search engines. You can find out just how to do it over at Daily Blog Tips.

The final thing I did was also something I picked up from Daily Blog Tips, namely modifying / optimizing the title tag. Check out that article as well. I had previously been using an “optimized” title tag, but it was a bit funky because the archives page just got the title from the most recent post in that category or month.

I also played a bit around with the header of the theme (the menu). It looks a bit funky now, but it still works. I think I’ll have to get around to completely redoing the top, because in all honesty it doesn’t look very good as it stands now.

Well that’s it for this little tip-filled post. In the coming days I’ll be transferring my blog to a new host, so now you know why if you can’t reach it in the near future. These days host-switching doesn’t involve much downtime though, especially concerned to five years ago. I’ll also be documenting the steps I take, and write a step-by-step guide to how to transfer your blog to a new host. It’s really easy, and I believe quite a few make it much harder than it has to be, so be sure to stay tuned for that.