Using the top-level blogs.bwerp.net for my blog and setting up additional blogs in subdirectories was a huge mistake, and one I regret regularly. Any sort of statistics or referral checking is completly inaccurate. Technorati is one glaring example, possibly in part to Matt‘s blog lacking a tilde in the URL. (Though I don’t place any blame on his shoulders. I should have known better.)
It’s far too late to fix the problem at this stage. There are hundreds of links back to every blog on the server, and changing anything would be a redirection nightmare.
This is something of a public apology, I guess. Dreadfully sorry for all this.
So if you could do it over, what would you do? Have blogs.bwerp.net redirect to adam.bwerp.net(or stay the same) and then have matt at matt.bwerp.net, etc? That’s something that’s fairly easy to do in cpanel(if you have it) and since you’re the site admin, you could make subdirectory requests redirect to the subdomain. That’s how I keep my stuff seperate, but I get hot for subdomains anyway.
Now that I think about it a little more, you’d probably have to change the document root of each blog and rebuild it, but that too, is fairly trivial. With the cpanel style subdomains(not sure how standard those are) all the old hardlinks would still work, but new links would be built on the subdomains.
If I could do it over again I would not mix directory structures like I’ve done now. (This is a bit of a simplification, but the appearance is that the directory structure is not clearly defined.) I would put my blog in ~adam, or give myself my own domain. Having / as my blog, /matt as Matt’s blog, and various other /~username blogs is too confusing.
Technically speaking, this is very easy to fix. I just don’t want to give up my domain (for historical reasons) and I wouldn’t force the rest of the blogs off just to keep blogs.bwerp.net for myself.
Ain’t I a stinker…
If, in the future, you want to move me to sixohthree.com or something, I’d be fine with that
Nope, I gave it to you. It’s yours for as long as you want it and I’m able to provide it.
First off, sorry that Technorati isn’t meeting your needs! We strive to be of service to you, so it always dismays me to hear that things aren’t working well or that we’re not providing you with what you want.
Having said that, I’m not sure I understand the problem. Can you describe it a bit more for me?
TIA! And please don’t hesitate to send us feedback at feedback@technorati.com…
Dave
Whoa. I post about Technorati, and not five hours later the founder and CEO replies? I could get used to this blogging thing.
Dave, thanks for your comment. Really, I don’t blame this problem on Technorati either. Here’s a clearer description of the setup:
My personal blog lives at http://blogs.bwerp.net/, with archives in the /archives/ subdirectory (http://blogs.bwerp.net/archives/). No problem there, similar setups exist on thousands of other blogs. Problem is, Matt’s blog, also hosted on blogs.bwerp.net, lives in the /matt/ directory. There are many other blogs: /xml/, /~abby/, /~isaac/, and so on. There’s nothing to differentiate one blog from another, at least in terms of the directory structure. All the URLs blend together.
The /matt/ directory seems to throw Technorati off the most; doing a query for blogs.bwerp.net shows many results that link to Matt’s blog, “Command-Option-Escape,” not mine. Searches for blogs that clearly belong to another user (ie. /~abby/) do have their own search results from what I can tell, but /matt/ has been a problem.
I’ve refrained from submitting this to the feedback address since it seems like an edge case, though I would do so at your request.
Thanks again.