A Consuming Experience

Well the attempt mentioned in my previous post didn't work. So please visit my main page all you like now, it's back to normal. And what happened?

First, I couldn't get all my posts to show on the main page (in Blogger it's Settings, Formatting, Show X posts on the main page. I had also, by the way, changed things in Settings, Publishing so that Notify Weblogs.com was set to No - I didn't want to muck up the indexing of my page by any other search engine in the process, and setting it to No means Blogger won't ping Weblogs.com when my page updates. I've set it back to Yes now, of course).

I came up against Blogger's 1 MB per page size limit. I kept getting error message "006 Please contact Blogger support "(usability point: why the heck they don't set the error message to say "Page size exceeds 1 MB limit, see http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1031", I don't know - that must garner them a lot of unnecessary emails to Support, and a waste of everyone's time).

By trial and error (working backwards from 90 and trying a smaller number of posts each time!) I found that 84 posts was the max, but that was still not bad - it took me back to June 2005. Icerocket started their tag pages service around the beginning of August 2005, so at least I would get some extra posts picked up on their tag pages. Or so I thought.

Well I was wrong. I duly pinged Icerocket with my blog URL after I got my 84 posts on the main page. But nothing. I pinged 2 or 3 times, left my blog for about 9 hours (which should be more than enough to get it reindexed), and the earliest post with the "Improbulus" tag on Icerocket's tag pages is still dated August 2005.

Oh well. Blake Rhodes of Icerocket said it was worth a try, but obviously it's not working. Pity. It would be good if they would explain what one can do to achieve this, but...

What's worse, it seems my various attempts to get this done have resulted in Blogger turning on their wretched CAPTCHA requirement for posting (that's "prove that you're human"!) - presumably because I then had 84 posts on my main page with loads of links in them, and they seem to assume that if you have lots of links it must be a spam blog. Unless it's a coincidence, of course. I have emailed them (see the Blogger help on how to get them to remove the word verification requirement for posting if you find yourself in the same boat), but who knows how long it'll take them to sort it, if at all. This is not a splog, Blogger!

The tags you use to get your posts on the tag pages of Technorati, by the way (see my introduction to Technorati tags if you're not familiar with them), will also work on Icerocket as is. The problem is that Icerocket only started picking up tags in August, so your pre-August 2005 posts just won't appear on Icerocket's tag pages, though they might be in their index for normal searching.

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Technorati Tags: Icerocket, blog, blogs, blogging, tags, tagging, Blogger, Blogger.com, Blogspot, spam blogs, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience

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