Blotanical News

I'm currently in the middle of tightening up some of the submission processes and have realised that it would be better to hear from you in relation to our acceptance policies. Up to this point, acceptance has been fairly relaxed and, in some ways, ad hoc.

So, I have a few ideas to throw your way and see what you think I should do with them - and I'll hopefully explain my concerns for them. Here goes;

1. Gardening BLOGS only? - a BLOG is defined as, " a shared on-line journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences and hobbies; 'postings on a blog are usually in chronological order'". This has been my benchmark for accepting sites up until now until I hit one the other day that came from Urban Farmer Weekly a Google Sites site. While it's not a blog by definition it very closely resembles it yet it doesn't produce an RSS feed and it's articles wouldn't feature in the Picks section. Your thoughts?
2. Minimum Age or Number of Posts? - should there be a pre-requisite number of posts that the blog contains before it's accepted? Or, should it be a certain age? Or should we accept any blogs regardless of either?
3. Ongoing registrations? - another point to consider is should Blotanical expect a blog to produce x number of posts regularly to remain listed? I know that some bloggers have been ill and have been unable to post as regularly as when they started but there now a few blogs that are listed that haven't posted anything for at least 6 months or more.
4. Blog Names? - should Blotanical continue to allow blogs to be submitted even though they share the same name with another blog already listed? Should they be separately identified somehow?

There's a few to get you started. I'm certainly not keen to make submission, or participation, too onerous but I am aware that if these things aren't at least considered on a community level then it may become distressing to some, if not all of us, in the future.

Once I've had some feedback, I'll try and compile a poll so that we can decide on some of these issues and any others that may come up through this discussion.

Thanks, in advance, for your expressions...

Posted by Stuart at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (48)

It's always an interesting period of time when I decide to modify the Picks section. By far, this feature of Blotanical is the most utilised but also the most infuriating character-building part to code.

Due to the emails, forum posts, blog posts, messages, comments and Help Desk queries I can safely assume that you've noticed something has been changing. While I try to keep most of the development offline there comes a point when the code must be tested in the 'wild' and this usually produces a few errors, weird results and even the odd line of code goes feral.

So, to let you in on what's been happening, here are some of the changes that have been made;

• Increased Top 10 to Top 15 - one of the main reasons for the change was to increase the Popular Picks list to 15 from it's original 10. Due to the number of blogs that are now producing quality posts it seemed a better deal to widen the scope of the list and enjoy some of the posts that were just missing the Top 10.


• Limited Top 10 placement to 1 per blog - another key change was limiting the Popular Picks so that each blog could only feature once. Prior to the change members could often see the top 2-3 blogs taking up to six or seven of the Top 10 which limited others enjoying the exposure


• %$#&* are going, going...gone - while I was performing these changes I thought I might also tackle the dreaded 'weird string' problem at the same time. You may have noticed some posts produce titles with heiroglyphics in them instead of quotes, ampersands, question marks etc. Also, many of the European blogs that contained graves, umlautes, tildes etc came up with ridiculous symbols.

  The problem has been considerably challenging primarily due to the multiple encoding types that bloggers use. While one solution worked for some, it wouldn't work for others and vice versa. So, after a very nasty piece of coding that looks more like spaghetti than poetry I finally secured a fix which solves 99% of the problem. The 1% will be continually rectified over the ensuing months.



• Autodiscovery - I have also been playing with some autodiscovery code that will eventually help solve the Pick Me buttons that never got off the ground. Stay tuned for more on this....


• Consistent results - one of the other issues that needed dealing with was inconsistent voting. Due to problems with keeping track of who you were voting for have now mostly been alleviated and errors on your My Posts should now start to be few and far between.

I can't guarantee that all the Picks problems have been remedied as there are just so many variables to consider when you're working with this much varied content. If you do spot some problems then I'm keen to hear about them but I hope that these fixes have solved a few of your bugbears.

Posted by Stuart at 6:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

My humblest apologies for taking so long to get these sorted for you. It's been an epic struggle - you be assured of that.

The aim in creating these was to ensure that only those who were entitled to have them on their blogs could have them. Therefore, unscrupulous bloggers (not that any of them exist within Blotanical) could pirate them and display them hoping to cash in on someone else's efforts.

So, without any further adoo let me explain how to get yours and how to add them to your blog, igoogle or wherever you would love to put them.

Here's the actual widget, but before you grab it there are some things you need to do so that it will work properly for you. Please read the whole post before setting off...

Step One
Double-click the Get & Share link. This will bring up a page of icons but before clicking on them you need to edit some settings. You can do that by clicking on the image (Options) as illustrated below;

Step Two
The first setting required is your Blog_URL. In this example, I've typed in Frances' blog at http://fairegarden.wordpress.com. (Make sure you include the http:// an don't include any trailing slashes).

The second setting is the ShowNumber field. Depending on your number choice it will show the badges that you want based on these settings:

• 1 - Show Winner badges only
• 2 - Show Winner and Runner-Up Badges only
• 5 - Show all badges including Finalists

Step Three
When you click Save, the widget will display the platform icons again. If you have a blog that uses one of these particular platforms, go ahead and click it. Otherwise, you can click the ALL tab and select EMBED from the scrolling list.

Step Four
The final step, before it deals with the login codes specific to your platform, is to select the size of the widget. You can't make it any smaller than the size depicted in the first example but you can make it bigger. My suggestion would be to leave it as it is.

And voila! You should now have the code to put it on your blog, if it hasn't already done it for you.

Here's an example of what you should be seeing, but with your own badges. If you didn't win any prizes then the widget will just display some links back to Blotanical reminding people that the 2009 awards will start on September 1.

UPDATE

For Wordpress bloggers: One possible workaround is to add this link to your sidebar - [You do this by going to the Appearance > Widgets and then click Add next to the Text Widget. Paste this code in, with its alterations and Bob's your uncle].

All you have to do to make it work on your blog is to replace the www.example.com with your own blog url and change the num parameter as per the settings listed above.

Hope this helps.

Posted by Stuart at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)