Pimp my Blog: J-Blogosphere: JRants.com

JRants.com

The last time I attempted to add myself to this blog aggregator, the form generated a whole host of errors. I tried several times over a period of days, but with the same result, and eventually gave up until now. According to the site itself:

JRants.com is the original and largest aggregator of Jewish and Israeli blogs on the Internet. JRants.com is the premier source for the latest Jewish and Israeli news from blogs all around the world.

I’m happy to say that my attempt appears to have been successful this time, as I received the following confirmation/status message:

Successfully added Altneuland

Your source will be activated as soon as I check the information and check the feed. If you would kindly add a link to JRants.com on your site, I would really appreciate it!

Thanks!

Fear not! I actually get paged when my site needs me to update or approve something!

The reciprocal linking process is less sophisticated that some I have come across. Again, according to the site:

I'm happy to add your blog to the site and publicize your headlines. Please put a link to JRants.com on your blog.

Feel free to use this image:

To comply, I need to add both a Link (I don’t currently have a “Blogroll” or links page), and the JRants.com image. Most aggregators deal with this issue by making available a snippet of HTML code. Adding this one snippet provides both the link and the image.

Anyway, that’s one more arrow in the quiver…

My rating? 8/10. I will update once Altneuland has been accepted.

Pimp my Blog: J-Blogosphere: JBlogSphere.com

Another dead end out there in the J-Blogosphere? This j-blog aggregator’s FAQ page tells me the following:

How do I add a blog? Send us a message via our contact form with your blog homepage and RSS/ATOM feed. We’ll do the rest.

I duly submitted the following note via the contact form:

Please add my blog to your site

My details are as follows:

Altneuland

http://blog.altneuland.info/

Advocating a secure & just Israel...

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Altneuland

Many thanks.

It seemed pretty innocuous to me, but instead of a confirmation, I got back the following scary error message:

Possible malicious code detected. No HTML, URIs, or anchor tags are allowed in message.

Yes, but that’s what you told me to do…

I eventually eliminated everything right down to the protocol stuff (http://), and finally received this message:

Contact Page

Thanks for your comments!

Holding thumbs, but I’m guessing the site is no longer being maintained.

My rating? 2/10. Let’s see what happens…

***

Post updated to delete the gratuitous link to JBlogSphere [.] com.

Pimp my Blog: J-Blogosphere

Israelated - English Israel blogs | Israel Related - An English blogging community on Israel and Israeli culture

If I recall correctly, this was the first Blog Aggregator (is that the correct term?) I added Altneuland to. Although I wasn’t too sure about some of the input being requested, it worked. My subsequent attempts to add myself to the rest of the J-Blogosphere were a lot less successful; I hope to take up that quest again shortly.

In checking back on the site, I noticed that none of my posts since early September 2007 were reflected. It seems that converting to FeedBurner broke my feed to Israelated, although I understood that that wasn’t supposed to happen. I updated the feed details and my later posts are now reflected. Pity about that; my modest “counter” of 229 reads (across all postings) might have been considerably higher.

I also subscribed to the “Feed for comments on this post”, but it looks as if it will only give me comments for Altneuland as a whole, not for the individual postings.

Overall, being on Israelated has been good for me. I’m listed here:

Altneuland | Israelated - English Israel blogs

My rating? 9/10. My only criticism is the slightly confusing interface.