I was wondering, are there any plans to add nodal point to blog search engines like Technorati?. From their marketing hype, it seems like a good idea. However, if this isn't a good idea, what are the reasons?
Nodalpoint in Technorati?
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Hallo; I'm new to
Hallo; I'm new to Nodalpoint. I've been stalking for a while and have decided to register.
I'm not sure the concern?
I cannot think of a negative...
To set it up, Nodalpoint's webmaster has to "claim" the site to demonstrate he is the owner to Technorati. Drupal does Technorati friendly more or less: more information on setting up Drupal for technorati.
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Time versus benefits
I think the main issue is that Nodalpoint's webmaster has rather a lot on his mind at the moment, for reasons that will be made clear in the near future :)
This may well increase Nodalpoint's "visibility", but there are multiple other ways to do that for rather less effort - the feed is already aggregated in various places, other blog links, the site is extensively crawled by search engines (Google is pretty much all that counts in my book). I'm fairly sure that on the whole, people are finding us without too much trouble. The spam bots sure are...
Not worth it IMO
Whether Nodalpoint will get much traffic from Technorati, I cannot say. I'm not sure how many people use Technorati for looking for bioinformatics-related articles (I don't). I think not many, so yes it's probably not worth the work at this moment.
Nodalpoint is currently using the Drupal CMS, version 4.5 or 4.6. Drupal 4.7 is a lot more "Technorati-friendly" (i.e. you do not need to do all the things in the URL I mentioned), so if Nodalpoint ever upgrades it is probably best to wait until then.
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Hello and welcome to
Hello and welcome to nodalpoint Samat. Right you are: nodalpoint is currently running the latest of the 4.6 series. I just haven't been mentally prepared for upgrading to 4.7. An upgrade, as you know, requires you to port your theme, and deal with module dependencies manually (no apt for Drupal unfortunately).
I will be very busy with work/personal commitments over then next few months, so no one should hold their breath for an upgrade until all that is over. That is unless I can get my time management better under control...
With regards to Technorati, I think time would be better spent making nodalpoint more Postgenomic, specifically the option to add review and conference metadata (i.e. rel tags).
I'm not sure what you mean
I'm not sure what you mean by this ?
Technorati already aggregates nodalpoint's RSS feed (I don't know if they are crawling the site). You can search for links to nodalpoint in Technorati, for example.
tagging?
Thanks I didn't realise technorati already aggregate the feed here. I suppose I was also thinking of technorati tagging but (please pardon my ignorance) the cost / benefit of this isn't that clear yet...
On a related note, I can't always find the tags I want in nodalpoints vocabulary, so another question is, how do I add my own...? Sorry if this is a stupid question...
It is not a stupid question.
It is not a stupid question. Technorati has a specification for including 'tags' that their system will recognise in any post (basically use rel='tag' on links). This is available for Drupal (nodalpoint's CMS) as a module (it may be in the new version of Druapl, I'm not sure). I don't know if Technorati runs a term recognition algorithm for posts without the special technorati tag link. This might be true as nodalpoint shows up under the tag bioinformatics.
As to nodalpoint's vocabulary, it is fiasco to say the least. The vocabulary system in Drupal is quite extensive. It is not just a vocabulary it is better described as a taxonomy management system. However neither I or anyone else have had the mental energy to describe a comprehensive taxonomy of subjects for the site (apologies to Chris, who did make an attempt which I never followed up on). Site admins should have a link to 'categories' which is where the taxonomy management interface is. Feel free to reorganize. One problem with taxonomies in Drupal is that when you delete one, all nodes categorized under that taxonomy have their classification removed. It makes sense of course, but it creates headaches when you want to reclassify posts under a more rationalized vocabulary (this is one of the reasons why I've not done anything about it).
Of course tags to the rescue. The good news is that Drupal 4.7 the latest release has tagging as part of the core. So all I need to do is upgrade the site to 4.7 and the problem should be solved. However upgrading has it's own set of problems... more on that later...
Tags
I may be wrong (Greg?), but I don't think you can generate your own tags, unless newer Drupal versions have this feature - they are set by the admins. We had a discussion some time ago about the tag vocabulary - it was devised in the early days of Nodal and does need some revision. Perhaps users could suggest tags that they would like.