Claiming your blog at Technorati
Cecil and Marie have recently asked me about Technorati, the blog tracking service and how to make best use of it.
The first thing is to make sure your blog is “pinging” Technorati when you make a new post. To check, go to the Settings area for your blog (in the “Configure” block of the left-hand navigation choices of the administrative interface). Then choose “New Entry Defaults.” Scroll down and make sure “blo.gs,” “weblogs.com” and “technorati.com” are all selected.
Next, go to the Technorati website and sign up for an account there. Once your account is set up and you’ve logged in, go through the process of “claiming” your blog. There is a quick way to do this where you give Technorati your login information for the Mediajunkie Movable Type interface, and that’s a perfectly fine way to claim the blog, but to make sure that Technorati continues to recognize your ownership of the blog, do the more involved process that ends up offering you a snippet of code to place on your blog.
You can insert this snippet into a new post on your blog, but this can mess up the flow of your entries and it will eventually scroll off the main page. The better way to go is to add the snippet to your main index template.
To do this, go to “Templates” in the Configure block, select the Main Index template, scroll through the text box to near the end, and insert the snippet before or after the statement about your blog being a Telegraph blog, managed by Mediajunkie and/or hosted by Open Publishing.
If this is all too confusing for you, just drop me a line and I’ll be happy to help you out.