Sephy’s Platzish

If you have a blog hosted on Google’s Blogspot service and have a domain, but aren’t ready to commit to a full-fledged hosting package just yet, or like Blogger, you can have your blog hosted by Google on your own domain. It is a service that I took advantage of since I got my own domain.

On the surface, it sounds a bit daunting to do it, but really, it is very simple. In fact, if you don’t have a domain name, Google offer the option to register a domain for $10. I’m not sure if this includes private registration, but I’m guessing it doesn’t, so I would recommend using a registrar like Godaddy where you can get a domain for around $9/year with private registration for $7 per year.

As a matter of fact, I registered with Godaddy and am very pleased with their service. It is easy to change the settings to suit your needs. I’d definitely recommend them. I will note here that the instructions I will give below are suited for you if you have registered with Godaddy. If you need to find the information for your particular registrar, Blogger have the instructions available here.

Step 1: Prepare Blogger

Just so you know, I took these screenshots from a couple of blogs that I have, so don’t worry if the address or blog name change.

When you’re ready to your blog to your own domain, I’d recommend having at least two windows open - one pointed at this page in blogger - Settings: Publishing. When you go there, it will look like this, with your blogspot address filled in.

Don’t save just yet; you need to make sure your domain is ready for Google’s hosting

Step 2: Prepare your domain

Now, open a new window or tab and go to the site where you registered your domain. For Godaddy, this is the screen you’ll see when you first log in; click on My Account to move to the next screen.

When you click on Total DNS Control, you will be taken to this page which has what could be described as a plethora of options for hosting. In my shots, I have it set up for Blogger already, but that doesn’t mean I can’t explain it, right?

When you do this, the CNAME (Alias) section will appear on the screen, and you should fill in the details as I have, with www (or whatever prefix you’ve decided to go with) in the first line, and ghs.google.com in the second. You can leave the TTL (Time to LIve) at 1 hour, that should speed up the propogation of your site.

Step 3: Confirm Blogger’s Settings

Now that you have your domain ready to accept Google’s request, you can now confirm the settings in Blogger. Simply hit Save Settings, and it will confirm the new configuration of your blog’s address.

If you reload the page now, it will look like this. Of particular note is the line that says “Forward {domain}.{tld} to www.{domain}.{tld}”. This is something that I have not tried out, so if you wish to try it out, it may not work, claiming that there is another blog on that domain.

Lastly, if you decide to move your blog to a full-fledged host and return your old blog to its blogspot domain, simply click the blogspot.com link next to Switch to.

What do you do now?

There are a few things that you will need to do after getting your blog’s address moved over from Blogspot to your own domain. Your list of things may vary, depending on what you all have on your site.

- Let everyone know about your new address, and tell them to update their links.
- If you have trackers installed, update the addresses they’re tracking to include the new address for your blog
- You will need to reclaim your new blog on Technorati. If you no longer want your old address to be listed in their listings, you can send them a note requesting that the old one be marked as irrelevant.
- If you’re a part of social networking sites like Bumpzee or Mybloglog, change the address of your blog there; on Bumpzee, that means that your blog will be placed back in the moderation queue for any communities you’re a part of.
- Update the links within your site to reflect your new domain. While all of those links will still work, it’s a good idea to change over the address in case you decide to move your blog in the future.
- This is just a tip, and not necessary - if you haven’t already done so, integrate your Blogger feed with FeedBurner, and encourage people to sign up using the FeedBurner link directly

Further Reading
Chuck, a major contributor to the Blogger Support group has a lot of information on custom domains on The Real Blogger Status: Custom Domains.

Previously in the Tuesday Think Tank
21st August: RSS
14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
Tuesday Think Tank: All About RSS

28th August: Blog Templates
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing

4th September: Nofollow
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!
Say No! to Nofollow

11th September: Site Meters
Do NOT Rely On Your Site Meter.
Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

18th September: Technorati
Technorati - Sending Out An SOS
The Ups (and Downs) of Technorati

25th September: Google Reader
Google Reader Can Make Your Life Easier - Here’s How.
Improving your Google Reader Experience

2nd October: HTML
Basic HTML for Bloggers.
Some HTML Tips & Tricks

9th October: Time Management
Time Management - Tuesday Think Tank
Use Google Calendar to organize your life

Over to you

Have you tried out Blogger’s custom domain service, and if so, did you like it? Have you tried Google’s domain registration service? Is it any good and, more importantly, does it provide privacy and for how much?

If you’ve liked this article, you can submit it to any one of a number of social networking sites using the links below.

If you have a topic that you’d like to have covered in a future Tuesday Think Tank by myself and Snoskred, we are always open for suggestions. You can send them to us by using the Contact form here.

I admit that I’m not the greatest at time management; considering that I often find myself “distracted by shiny objects” - usually at the worst time, but one thing that I’ve always loved using are online calendars. In fact, I started to use a computer-based calendar back around 2000, using Microsoft Outlook to list the various activities that I was in.

Even when I was in college, I’d kept using Outlook to keep track of where I was and what I was going to be doing during the day. I even had a Palm Pilot (which disappeared one day on me, unfortunately) where I’d sync the contents of my Outlook calendar with the organizer. However, I went away from using Outlook’s calendar when I left college and fell into the routine workday habit.

Now, I’ve rediscovered using calendars, and have started to use Google’s calendar, aptly named Google Calendar. If you haven’t used it before, there isn’t a lot to learn to get to use it like a pro. You can have your own private calendar, make a calendar that you can share with your friends, have any variety of public calendars listed, and even make a public calendar for yourself.

Obviously, when you start to use it, you will be asked to give some basic information - your name (just put in whatever you want; it’s what’s used for the name of your main calendar), location, and timezone (if you want to use a timezone without changing your country, simply check the display all timezones box). Click Continue to proceed.

The first thing that you will see is this week’s calendar, with each day split into its 24 hours. You have a variety of views that you can choose from - Today, This Week, This Month, the Next x Days (you can change this in the settings), and the Agenda. At the left, you have this month’s calendar laid out for you to have a glance at - if you have an event on a certain day, it will be marked in bold. However, since we’ve not made any events (in this calendar, at least), you won’t see any dates in bold.

Creating events couldn’t be any easier than Google have made it - to make an all day event, simply click in the gray bar below the date, or if you are in month view, click on that day. When you’re in Day, Week or Next x Days mode, you can also click and drag to make an event that has a set time. Just as an example, I’m going to make an event for Tuesday 9th October from 6.30-10.30AM. I simply click and drag from 6.30 to 10.30, and up pops up this little bubble -

If you want to add details to the event right away, you can simply click edit event details » and you can add information about the item like location, a description, and have control over the guest list; however, more on that later. When you make an event in the calendar view, if you words such as “at” or “in”, the calendar will recognize the next portion of your entry as the location. Since I’m not creative in any sort, I’m just going to use Google’s example of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and click Create Event to book the event, which makes it pop up in the calendar, like this -

Has the event changed dates or times? All you need to do is, instead of manually changing the date and time, just drag the box to the new time, or if the event got longer or shorter, just drag the bottom of the event’s box up or down to change the length of the event.

Calendar Settings

There are a number of settings you can change with regards to your calendar. From the front page, you can change the color of the calendar’s display, and have access to the full settings for that calendar. All you have to do is click the little down-arrow next to your calendar’s name, which brings up this menu -

In the Calendar Settings page, you can change a number of settings for your calendar, including making a description, changing its name, setting a location and customizing the timezone. At the bottom are two sets of addresses which you can use in order to view your calendar in another program that accepts xml or ical calendars, or view your calendar in html.

The other page I will cover right here is the Notifications page. Here you can adjust the settings for how you want to be notified about events, or remove default reminders. You can also set notifications for invitations you send or receive, and if you wish to be notified on your mobile, have the notifications sent directly to you. It’s all fairly straightforward, and here is what it looks like -

There are also the overall settings that you can change by clicking on the Settings link in the upper right. Here, you have options to change the look of your calendars, set the formats of times, dates, and the week. There are a couple of interesting items on this page - first is the Location field - that doesn’t set your location in your calendar, but allows you to view the weather for your area. This is only available if you are in the US.

The Calendars tab allows you to change calendars that you have, and calendars that you are viewing, along with being able to add public calendars to your view. The Mobile Setup tab is where you can input your phone details if you wish to have notifications sent to you via SMS; normal rates apply. Click here for a list of supported carriers.

Sharing Calendars

If you want to share your calendar with a friend, it’s down right simple. All you have to is click on Share this Calendar in the drop down on the front page, which takes you to the Share this calendar page.

All you have to do to share the calendar with a friend is put in their email address under person, set their permission and then Add them. They’ll receive an email inviting them to add your calendar to theirs. Here you can also set the public sharing options. If you share your calendar publicly, then it can be searched out by all people and visible by anyone out there.

Adding Public Calendars

While sharing your calendar might be an unwise move, there are a lot of useful calendars that you can add to your calendar for reminders of TV Shows, Holidays, sport schedules, just search for it and you’ll likely find it. Google have put together a list of some of the most common calendars, and you can access them by clicking on the Add link on the left hand side and clicking on Add a public calendar, which brings up the “top pick” calendars:

Of course, there are quicker ways to do things than just clicking.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Like most Google products, calendar has its own set of keyboard shortcuts that make the service easier to navigate. Here is a handy table for you cut out and keep (note that there is no help key to make a list appear)

If you’re not one for Google knowing your agenda, would like to have your calendar available offline (through Google’s syncing options), or prefer to simply do all of your calendar management offline, there are a couple of programs that you can use for your calendar.

The first one is the one I mentioned at the start - Microsoft Outlook. I’ll only recommend this option if you already have Office installed on your system; there’s no point in buying the full suite of applications when you only want to use a portion of the functionality that is available to you. Also, Outlook is definitely harder to use than Google Calendar.

If you would like to use your Google Calendar both online and offline, you can pick up a free piece of software from SourceForge called GCALDaemon. Download it here (you will have to have the Java Runtime Environment installed). The folks at Lifehacker have also put together a how-to for the software.

Another option available for both Windows and Linux users is Rainlendar - it is a simple calendar that sits on your desktop, always available for you. They also have a pro version which includes support for Google Calendar. You can find out more information about the product here.

The last option is for those of us who like using Mozilla products like Firefox and Thunderbird - Sunbird & Lightning. If you already use Thunderbird, you can download the Lightning Add-on (or extension) and integrate all the features of Sunbird into Thunderbird. If you don’t have Thunderbird or your Thunderbird is already pretty chock-a-block with extensions and accounts, there is Sunbird, which is a standalone program.

Like the two previous options, you can integrate your Google Calendar into the program through the use of another extension called Google Calendar Provider. Click here for more information on these options.

Further Reading
In the companion post to this, Snoskred will talk about time management and she has some great tips that you really should follow.

Her post should be up sometime in the next few hours; I’ll have a link to it when it’s up.

It is now up. You can read her tips on Time Management - Tuesday Think Tank

Tips and Tricks for Google Calendar
Rock Your Google Reader in 18 Ways
Stopdesign | Google Calendar tips
Geek to Live: Black belt scheduling with Google Calendar

Previously in the Tuesday Think Tank
21st August: RSS
14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
Tuesday Think Tank: All About RSS

28th August: Blog Templates
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing

4th September: Nofollow
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!
Say No! to Nofollow

11th September: Site Meters
Do NOT Rely On Your Site Meter.
Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

18th September: Technorati
Technorati - Sending Out An SOS
The Ups (and Downs) of Technorati

25th September: Google Reader
Google Reader Can Make Your Life Easier - Here’s How.
Improving your Google Reader Experience

2nd October: HTML
Basic HTML for Bloggers.
Some HTML Tips & Tricks

Over to you
Do you use a computer-based calendar for your organization? If so, which one do you use?

Also, do you have some tips that would make using any of these calendars easier?

Of course, if you have something that you’d like for Snoskred and myself to discuss, we are definitely open for suggestions. You can leave a comment or send an email to me, or contact Snos via her contact page

If you’ve liked what you’ve read, you can stumble the post using your toolbar or the link below.

One of the most mystifying things about being a blogger is understanding the language that your site is written in. I don’t mean the language of your content, but rather the language that the actual page is written. The language which makes text look like this or this - HTML.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and was created in the late 1980s by engineers at CERN, who were the creators of the World Wide Web. The actual specification has gone through lots of changes over the last two decades. The latest specification to be released was version 4.01, which was released in 1999. However, other languages have started to appear which use HTML as their basis.

On the surface, it can all sound confusing, but I’m going to show you how to do some neat tricks with HTML that will allow you to maximize the potential of the language itself. When I put a sample of HTML down, it will look like this -

Typewriter text: Tag - <tt>Typewriter text</tt>
I’ll also give a table later on to show you how to get characters such as the less than and greater than symbol into your text, without your browser confusing it for actual, bona-fide HTML.

Adding text to images

Something that you see quite often when it comes to a web page is when you see an image, and put your mouse over it, you see this -

- that is the result of using the “title” property for an image. You can also use the “alt” property, which is good for disabled accessibility, but the text you put there might not appear in some browsers unless the image cannot load. Also, it is technically correct to not show the “alt” property in a tooltip, something which I’ve just learnt while writing this. The “title” property can also be used for a wide variety of tags. To add “alt” or “title” to an image tag, simply use this code:

<img src=”http://address.of.image.net/img/sub/img.png” title=”You can place the title of the image here.” alt=”Alt text is useful for disabled access, but also if your image doesn’t load as some browsers will display the alt text in place of the image.” />

The result would look something like this; put your mouse over each image to show the title and/or alt information. Let me know in the comments which information you wind up seeing.

<span style=”text-decoration:overline” title=”This means that you can see it”>hover to see a secret message!</span>

The result is this - Hover to see a secret message!.

CSS Primer

That last example brings us neatly to another topic that has become quite prevalent in blogs nowadays: using CSS to change the look of your page. The key in the last example is the

If you use Blogger, you’ve certainly logged into your blog’s template and seen this -

- then wondered what in the world does all that garbeldy-gook mean? Well, it is called CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. They have been a part of HTML for many years, but were first officially implemented for use on the web in the mid-90s. Now, it is a common way of telling your browser how to show a page to you.

With CSS, there is an almost-endless variety of things that you can do to a page using CSS, including putting items into certain places, setting the width of a page element, and even changing the look of the text in your page, as I did in the example above. In fact, changing the look of your font is one of the most common, and easiest, things you can do with CSS.

For example, if you wanted to have (and this is not an example I’d recommend you actually do, it’s just for demonstration purposes ;)) text that was about an inch high, with a line through it, and blinking red, with the font as Comic Sans. Here’s how you’d do it:

<span style=”font-size:400%;text-decoration:line-through blink;color:rgb(255,0,0);font-family:’comic sans ms’”>Use smaller numbers, and don’t use blink</span>

Here’s how it would look (warning, you might want to put on glasses!)

Seriously, change some numbers and don’t use blink, ok?

Now, if you haven’t been blinded by that, here’s an example of changing the alignment, width and height of a section, causing a scrollbar to appear. The text comes from the automatic complaint letter generator, but first the code I’m going to use. Since the text I’m using is longer than a couple of words, I will use the “div” tag instead of the “span” tag:

<div style=”text-align:justify;width:338px;height:325px;overflow:auto”>Put really long chunk of text here</div>

And now, here it is in practice; I’ve added centering tags for viewing purposes:

Making HTML code appear

You’ll notice that throughout this post, you’ve been able to see the actual HTML to use in a page written out for you. There is a secret to getting it to show up; that is called using an “escape character”. If you’ve worked on some computer systems in the past, you may be familiar with the use of the backslash to get things to appear. In HTML, it is almost the same thing, but there is a specific way that you have to write it out for it to work.

All of these characters start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon. The letters in between determine the character that will appear. Below is a table with some of the more common escape characters used in HTML.

Further Reading

In the companion post to this, Snoskred gives you some good Basic HTML for Bloggers. She has some great information about some of the more important bits of code you will use as a blogger.

There are many great resources out there for learning HTML and CSS. First, here are some useful links for learning HTML (nicked from Snoskred’s post, with her permission ;))

HTML Reference:
If you know nothing about HTML, this is where you start
Getting Started Tutorial
HTML Code Tutorial
HTML Help
HTML Tutorials At W3
HTML Goodies
HTML Dog
Learn HTML And CSS
Learn Basic HTML For Your Website
Web Safe Color Chart
Non-dithering colors

CSS Reference:
All CSS Properties Listed Alphabetically
CSS Reference at W3 Schools
Mashable: CSS Toolbox, 22 Tools for Working with CSS (there are some great resources there, definitely have a look!)
How to Style an Unordered List with CSS

Previously in the Tuesday Think Tank
21st August: RSS
14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
Tuesday Think Tank: All About RSS

28th August: Blog Templates
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing

4th September: Nofollow
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!
Say No! to Nofollow

11th September: Site Meters
Do NOT Rely On Your Site Meter.
Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

18th September: Technorati
Technorati - Sending Out An SOS
The Ups (and Downs) of Technorati

25th September: Google Reader
Google Reader Can Make Your Life Easier - Here’s How.
Improving your Google Reader Experience

Over to you!

HTML isn’t that hard to learn, and if there’s something that you’re trying to figure out and would like looked at, feel free to comment here.

As always, if you have something that is on your mind that you would like to have explained in a future Tuesday Think Tank, contact either myself or Snoskred via email or in the comments and we’ll post about it.

Lastly, if you like what you’ve read, you can Stumble the post, either using the toolbar or the link below.

Over the last few weeks, one thing that would keep me from actually reading blogs was the way I was reading them. For as long as I can remember, my Google Reader just read “100+” for the number of unread items (note that this was before they started counting to 1,000). To make matters worse, I’d add feeds left, right and center, and just dump them into the main list of feeds.

Sure, I did have some folders, such as one for feeds from the newspaper, one called “new-nablopomo”, and one called new-blogz. The trend would be that I’d read the items in the folder, and then get further down the list, only reading one or two of the blogs from down there.

I had reached, as Meg puts it, “feed bankruptcy,” something she’s had to redeclare recently. I was missing lots of items in my feeds, and I would get bogged down in the knowledge that there were all these feeds needing to be read.

However, there were a few problems with how I was reading feeds in my Google Reader. The first of which is that I just had way too many feeds in there - before I started paring it down, I was at 141 feeds, almost all of them not in any folders whatsoever. Among those feeds, I had five in particular - feeds from scam sites - which were giving me an average of over 200 new posts a day.

If you add in the fact that the Bumpzee feeds I subscribe to - Australian Blogs, No Nofollow, and US Blogs - provide nearly 300 new posts a day on their own, I had over 500 new posts a day. I also felt that I had to read every last post in a feed, which contributed to me feeling snowed in with the feeds.

What did I do?

There are three things that I did to improve my use of Google Reader - unsubscribing, using folders, and changing how I read.

Unsubscribing

As I had mentioned, before I started on this, I had 141 feeds, which was way too many. I had to unsubscribe from quite a few blogs. Most of the feeds that I unsubscribed from are ones that I hadn’t been reading, for a variety of reasons - either they didn’t update anymore, they’ve moved, or I’ve just lost touch with them. A great guide to some of the reasons why I unsubscribed from a lot of blogs can be found in Snoskred’s 14 reasons readers unsubscribe.

I’m now down to (after adding some new feeds over the last few weeks) 113 feeds. I’m also taking it easy on adding every single blog I come across that I like now.

Using folders

I also started to make use of the folder option. Up until I did this, there were only a few feeds separated from the rest - job site feeds, feeds from my newspaper, and newer blogs that I was reading. Now, having finally finished sorting the rest of my feeds into folders, I have 16 separate folders with anywhere from two feeds up to about 15 feeds in them.

I have folders for Aussie blogs that I read, blogs about Blogging, foodie blogs, life improvement blogs, sport blogs, photoblogs, and a couple of special folders.

The first special folder that I made is called “Frequently-updated” - that folder is for the feeds that have a lot of posts every day; in my case - Lifehacker, Neatorama, Mashable! and English Russia. I’ve also set aside a folder specifically for the bumpzee feeds so that they don’t get forgotten and that I don’t get bogged down by seeing one single folder with a lot of unread posts. The last special folder is called Zzz-iftime, which is for blogs that I read, but aren’t updated too often or are blogs I tend to leave go for a variety of reasons.

Changing my reading habits

The biggest thing that I’ve done to improve my use of Reader is by simply changing how I read through feeds. It used to be that I read every single post in what is known as “expanded” view - viewing every item in its entirety. This is a strategy that does not work at all when you have feeds that give you dozens of new posts a day.

The contents of my “frequently-updated” folder in list view.

I made the decision one day to start using list view to view the really busy folders - frequently-updated and bumpzee. That way, I can simply have a look at each item’s headline and, if it piques my interest, I just click on the headline to view that article. When I’m done reading that folder, I just hit Shift+a to mark the whole folder read, and that’s that.

Viewing an item in its native environment thanks to GPE.

One of the best tools that I have found that helps my reading is a script for Greasemonkey called GPE - Google Reader Preview Enhanced (I haven’t been able to get to the site, so you may have issues as well). What this script does is lets you open the actual entry right in Google Reader. This is great for the blogs where the owner has chosen to only allow a partial feed of their site; it’s also great if you want to comment on a blog post you like.

The biggest drawback that I’ve had with this script is that it keeps breaking down so that the keyboard shortcut doesn’t work; otherwise, I’d be able to use shift+v to open the post. In fact, the script was just updated so that it works again. Yay! Hmm…or not…there’s a new version on the way though, so hopefully it will stick (or I just need to restart my firefox… :))

The last secret…

There is one more secret that I’ve been using for quite a while now to help me be a more efficient reader in Reader. It’s a secret that is, for most of us, right under our fingertips most of the time.

Keyboard Shortcuts.

Google Reader keyboard shortcuts, visible anytime by typing in a question-mark.

I’m a convert to using keyboard shortcuts. It was one of those extra features in Gmail that I said, well, that’s nice, but not for me (and honestly I’m still lukewarm to Gmail keyboard shortcuts). However, with Reader, I find that it’s a lot more efficient to flip through a list of items by using N and P (if you don’t want to open them), or by using J and K (if you do want to open them).

Part of that comes from the fact that I am a big user of keyboard shortcuts in Thunderbird - most often it’s using N & P (for unread messages) or B & F (for messages that are read), or one of the number keys to assign an item a color.

Another really handy thing that I can do with the shortcuts is make tagging posts easier. Say, for example, I saw a recipe that I wanted to try. Normally, I’d have to star it and leave it unread in order for it to get my attention. Now, all I do is type in the following - L , F, U, enter, enter. This generates the keyword fud2try and places that recipe into my own virtual recipe box, for me to try when I can scrape together the ingredients. Total amount of time taken - about 3 seconds.

I know that keyboard shortcuts won’t be for all of you, but I suggest you take them for a spin before rejecting them out of hand. You might be surprised.

Further Reading

Pearl has posted some great links about Google Reader with Google Reader hacks-repository.
Alex Ionut. Chitu shares some of the numbers behind Google Reader
In the companion post to this, Snoskred takes up the techy side of Reader and shows how it can make your life easier.

Previously in the Tuesday Think Tank
21st August: RSS
14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
Tuesday Think Tank: All About RSS

28th August: Blog Templates
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing

4th September: Nofollow
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!
Say No! to Nofollow

11th September: Site Meters
Do NOT Rely On Your Site Meter.
Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

18th September: Technorati
Technorati - Sending Out An SOS
The Ups (and Downs) of Technorati

Over to you
Do you have any tips that for making the Google Reader experience more efficient? What do you think should be added to Reader that isn’t there already? I know that having the actual post time showing would be really handy. Your thoughts are always welcome.

Don’t forget that if there is something you’d like to have covered in a future Tuesday Think Tank, feel free to contact either myself or Snoskred via the email links on our sites, or leave a comment with your request.

Lastly, if you like what you’ve read, feel free to stumble it using the links below or by using the toolbar.

This week’s Tuesday Think Tank came as the result of a request from Julie, who had some questions about Technorati and why her ranking has been changing recently. If you have something you want to have covered in a future Tuesday Think Tank, we always are willing to take suggestions; all you need to do is send an email to either myself or to Snoskred, and we will tackle your topic on a future Tuesday.

There really isn’t a lot to explain technically when it comes to Technorati. The biggest thing is basically an explanation of how it all works.

Technorati is most often considered the way to gauge a blog’s popularity. It works by counting both the number of blogs that it finds with links to your blog, and also the actual number of pages that link to your blog.

There are three different numbers that come as a result of Technorati’s counting - Authority, Rank, and Reactions.

Authority and Rank are intertwined, one based on the other. Authority is simply the total number of blogs that have linked to your site, or to a page on your blog. In other words, no matter how many links a particular site may have to you, it will only count as one authority point. Rank is derived from authority and is simply where your blog’s authority ranks among all blogs they have listed.

When you start a blog, it starts with an authority of 0 and a rank of somewhere around 8 million. As blogs start to link to you, the numbers do improve; however, to get into the top 100 blogs by Authority, you’ll have to have close to 4,000 different blogs linking to you. To get into the top 100,000 (which would have gotten you a nice graph in the past, but recent changes have seen the dropping of that graph), you would need an authority of around 60.

The most important thing to know is that authority and rank are not permanent numbers; of course you do want them to improve over time, but after a while, specifically six months, they may begin to go down. The simple reason for this is that links listed on Technorati “expire” after that amount of time. While I’m not an expert in Technorati, the main reason would be that some of the links might be in posts, or they might be temporary links which go away (for example recent comments lists on dofollow blogs).

Reactions are simply all the links that go back to your blog. This includes links in blogs’ links lists, links within posts, and links that come from other methods of linking, such as from the dofollow blogs.

If you want to see the daily “performance” of your blog’s reaction, you can check out an image like this -

- which shows you the links over the last X days. The address to use is the following -
http://www.technorati.com/chartimg?q={URL}&days={# OF DAYS}&width=460&height=200&type=url