Claiming a blog in Technorati should be a simple task, but it proved to be tricky this time. For those unaware of Technorati, here's what Technorati - Wikipedia has on them:
Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo!
How I see Technorati, it's the most relevant blog search engine, and thus, the most important site to "list" your blog or in this case claim the blog to yourself, so you can increase your "Technorati Authority". For me, increasing the authority is not a priority, but I like to ease the process of finding my blog, in case someone is in need for information I can provide. And if listing at Technorati helps to achieve that it's all good.
Claiming a Blog In Technorati
Claiming your blog establishes that you are its owner, and allows the author to use Technorati services to increase the blog’s visibility, like setting up tags, description and such, in addition to the author profile visible at the site...
For more information, check the Technorati Support: FAQ: What does Claiming my blog do for me?".
Here is a link to my Technorati Profile. The claim process was giving me a hard time, and the service couldn't seem to pick up the code from sidebar or footer, so I decided to put the code in the post, in case that would help. When the post was first published, the link had the claim code to tell the Technorati spiders I'm the author of this blog.
Cleaning Up The W3C Markup
While at it, I ran the W3C Markup Validation Service check for the blog and failed at start. The Related Sites plugin had some format errors, so I dropped it for now, even that it provides nice features finding similar websites based on the content in a post and the blog.
I also had some of my own formatting in non-valid format, using large letter at the start-tag and small on the closing-tag, e.g. <B> and </b> for boldness, but this kind of start-large, end-small is not valid markup as it's case sensitive, at least for the Doctype this blog uses.
But after some cleaning up and running the validation again, it passed, so now this blog was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
Unfortunately using WordPress plugins makes it hard to maintain the validity, as the markup validation is rather strict. This isn't too much of a problem, but it is a thing for plugin/widget/theme creators to consider, as valid markup code always looks more professional. Check this blog for validity by clicking the "Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional" button (different results whether you are on frontpage, individual post, archive, etc.) or check you own blog/website validity at W3C Markup Validation Service. Note that your blog or website might use different doctype/namespace for the markup code.
Technorati Claim Process Diary
- Tried the claim code in the sidebar and footer, but didn't get success
- Checked markup validation with W3C
- Disabled Related Sites plugin and corrected the markup errors
- Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Yay!
- First version of this post published, along with the Technorati claim code
- It seems that Technorati is having some issues at the moment, due load and traffic I assume, but got the pretty funny error message "Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again." on the validation.
- Technorati was making massive move of their servers on the time this post, which explains the performance issues.
- Success! Blog claimed. Woohoo
Which means, I can use buttons like this on the blog:
If you like what you see in a blog you're reading, by clicking the "Add to Technorati Favorites" link or a button like above, you can tell others you liked the blog and get it on your follow list at Technorati too. At Technorati you can then search for more similar blogs if you like or check their popular now -lists or whatever you like.
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