Or policy on spam, or anything that could be construed as spam, is absolute zero tolerance.

To express my gratitude for the whole of the community, I will offer a special for new yearly subscriptions. If you subscribe to be a new Friend of pfblogs.org before June 30 with an annual subscription, I will drop your rate to $50 per year.

You must use this l ink to receive the special yearly price.

You don’t have to be a Friend of pfblogs.org in order to take add this feature to your blog. For example, to pull the most popular personal finance articles into your blog, use the URL http://pfblogs.org/pf/pop/feed/ with your RSS tools. The links on these feeds are redirected through pfblogs.org so we can count any visitors towards an article’s popularity ranking.

HC at One Big Mortarboard has organized a campaign to raise a total of $1,500 out of about $1,900 remaining to fully cover four projects focusing on bringing money management skills to the schools. Teachers have personally submitted these projects to DonorsChoose to find funding. Here are the details on the four programs searching for funding, which have been selected by personal finance bloggers. Four more programs are waiting to take the place of this first set once it is fully funded.

For more information, see the posts on Consumerism Commentary, One Big Mortar Board, Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge, and An English Major’s Money.

The Blogroll is a great way to see who has updated their blog recently, with priority given to Friends of pfblogs.org. The more we encourage use of the Blogroll, the more valuable membership in the Friends of pfblogs.org will be.

Starting today and for the next two weeks, any current blogger who currently has or adds permanently the pfblogs.org Blogroll, will receive a three-month extension to the end of their membership. If the blogger is not currently a Friend of pfblogs.org, they will receive free membership for three months. Just leave a comment here with a link to your blog or blog post where you mention the Blogroll. Though no specific post about the Blorgoll is necessary, it is encouraged.

Please note. This offer is only valid for non-commercial blogs, those blogs not designed to sell or in support of a product or service.

There is one issue that Friends of pfblogs.org must be aware of. If you have a subscription through PayPal, make sure you keep your information updated with your latest credit card. If your credit card expires, PayPal will cancel your subscription, likely without warning. This has happened to a few people over the last few weeks, and for those who have a yearly subscription, you may not even notice until it’s time to renew several months from now.

Please check your credit card on file with PayPal if you have a monthly or yearly subscription for the Friends of pfblogs.org.

If you have the ability to help with this project, it would be greatly appreciated.

Update: The server is now as stable as it was before the move, and blog posts should be fetched as normal. If you have any problems in the future, email the webmaster. We’re still looking for anyone willing to assist with getting pfblogs.org onto a dedicated server or two.

If you do not have a monthly or yearly subscription, email the webmaster to find out when your membership in the Friends of pfblogs.org is expiring. If you were an early adopter, you’ll qualify for a very low rate.

• MyPFblogs uses the popular WordPress blogging software.
• The websites have excellent uptime, unlike other hosted options.
• You will qualify for a discounted membership in the Friends of pfblogs.org.
• The personal finance blogging community is close-knit, and MyPFblogs is a great way to get in the midst of the activity.
• We have over 60 themes to choose from, and more will be added.
• Your site will be protected by the latest Spam-Karma 2 plug-in.
• You can easily import all of your posts if you’re migrating from another service such as Blogger.

Take a look and sign up. More questions are answered at MyPFblogs.com.

There are many new features coming to pfblogs.org this year, so now is a good time to join or renew membership in the Friends of pfblogs.org. Many who were with the site from the start will be seeing their first year of membership end in April. Contact the webmaster to make sure your membership doesn’t expire.

The time has come to look for a new, robust hosting system which will cost us some money. If you’re a Friend of pfblogs.org, please consider making an additional donation. This will help us add features and stability.

Here’s a little bit about what we have in store for 2007.

* User accounts. Create your own profile, claim your blog, vote others’ posts up.
* For that matter, voting.
* Tags. Make it easier to find blog posts you’re actually interested in, possibly block topics you’re not.
* A new level of Friends of pfblogs.org to highlight the best blogs.

The details are still being developed and the programming might take several months, but those are just a few of the improvements you can look forward to next year.

Pinging still works properly, so if you are a Friend of pfblogs.org and you’ve configured your blogging software to ping our server, then you won’t see any problems.

Sorry for all the problems; looks like we’re (still) gonna need a better host.

For this reason, the fetching process is now performed on a grid server hosted with MediaTemple. Their support has been very helpful, but they automatically kill tasks that last more than 15 minutes — even shell tasks. Thanks to the growth in the number of blogs, the fetching process is now split to last under 15 minutes each time.

Four times an hour, for about 8 minutes each time, half of all blogs in the database are fetched. This has been working very well for the last twenty-four hours or so. This way, each blog is fetched twice an hour. This is above and beyond the pings allowed for the Friends of pfblogs.org, which are still being performed by the DreamHost server.

Now that we have more stability, we’re working on a new feature: free hosted blogs, powered by WordPress, for anyone who wants to start a personal finance blog. Blogs hosted on the new service can join the Friends of pfblogs.org at a discount, but must stay somewhat active. The service is being tested as I write this, and we hope to release it to the public within the next few weeks.

Update: Thanks to everyone who responded! The Advisory Panel team is now in place.

Don’t hesitate to add a blog to the massive aggregator!

Speaking of the aggregator, we are now dually hosted, with one shared server at Dreamhost which serves the website to visitors, maintains the database, deals with pings, and is the backup 30-minute fetcher. The other is a “grid server” at MediaTemple which functions as the main 30-minute fetcher. As we further test how the servers manage loads, responsibilities may move around.

Feedburner may still not fetch your newest entries within ten minutes. If this is something that happens often and you’d like the behavior to change, allow pfblogs.org to fetch your local RSS feed rather than the one hosted by Feedburner. This may take some extra work depending on your configuration.

Update: Pinging service has returned, including the 5 minute delay for those using Feedburner. Please make sure you are also pinging Feedburner’s server in your notification configuration.

Therefore, for those Friends who use Feedburner and ping pfblogs.org, the server will wait 5 minutes before fetching the RSS feed. If the blog also pings Feedburner, this should be sufficient. To avoid this 5 minute delay, contact us with the non-Feedburner address for your RSS feed. If you are using a redirection for local RSS requests, pfblogs.org servers should be excluded from the directive.

Commercial members of the Friends of pfblogs.org pay $50 a month, still much less than the state value of just the link.

If you join before November 1, you will have the lower price for the life of your membership. To join the Friends of pfblogs.org, read this information.

There’s now a simpler way to request listing on pfblogs.org. It’s as simple as filling out a form. The blog will still have to be reviewed of course. There are new personal finance blogs popping up every day. I’ve refined the “guidelines” of what we’re looking for… it seems like most people are trying to make a quick buck rather than developing content first. I’m not a fan.

Their estimates may be a little high, but here’s the skinny. A link on every page within pfblogs.org, which is what we give our Friends, can go for up to $145 a month! This is significantly more than my own blog can generate on a per link per month basis.

So what does this mean? It means the Friends of pfblogs.org are getting a great deal if they are considering search engine optimization. Friends who partnered early on in pfblogs.org got the best deal, but for a long time now, Friends have been paying only $2.00 a month for premium listing. Commercial members have been paying $35.00 a month. Those prices are locked in for lifetime.

As you may know, prices for Commercial membership in the Friends is increasing on October 1 to $50.00 per month. This is still a great deal, according to LinkWorth.

Non-commercial membership in the Friends of pfblogs.org will be increasing to $4.99 per month, for new members, starting November 1. There are many benefits to being a Friend of pfblogs.org (more info here), but if you’re serious about your non-commercial, non-spam, non-affiliate-whore personal finance, investing, or real estate blog, this is the place to be listed, and October will be the last month to sign up for the bargain-basement rate of $2.00 a month.

All current non-commercial Friends as of October 31, including those who donated during our Annual fundraiser earlier this year, have the opportunity of renewing or extending their membership at any time for $2.00 a month. If renewing early, additional months will be added to the end of the membership.

• Get your numerical blog ID by finding your blog on the sidebar on pfblogs.org or through the full blog listing.
• Configure your blogging software to ping http://pfblogs.org/ping/BlogID where BlogID is your numerical blog ID.
• Post as you normally would (please, no “test posts”) and check pfblogs.org in the next minute or so. Your post should appear.

There are several reasons this might not work for you.

• You may not have correctly entered the ping URL, which should be, for example, http://pfblogs.org/ping/20. Replace “20″ with your blog’s numerical ID used by pfblogs.org.
• You may have your time zone configured incorrectly in your RSS feed or blogging software.
• Some feeds generated by Blogger are incorrectly formatted.
• You may have an invalid character in your feed.
• The server hosting your feed may be unavailable for a short amount of time.
• Your entry, or the summary in your RSS feed, is fewer than ten words long.
• If pfblogs.org uses your Feedburner feed, there is a delay between the time you post and the time when Feedburner updates your feed.

If you believe there is some issue other than the examples above, email the webmaster who will have debugging information for all pings that hit the pfblogs.org server.

Note: This feature is available only to Friends of pfblogs.org and only one ping for a particular blog will be processed every 30 minutes. If you use Feedburner and pfblogs.org uses your Feedburner feed rather than your local feed, your ping may not be effective, due to the delay between the time you post and Feedburner’s update.

The inclusion of spam blogs reduces the quality of pfblogs.org.

Note: this change only affects Commercial Memberships. On October 1, Non-Commercial Memberships will still be only $2.00 each month.

And listen: It’s currently $2 a month ($35 a month for “commercial” sites) to become a member of the Friends of pfblogs.org, which provides some neat features (and more to come soon!) for bloggers who are serious about promoting their blog. All current Friends are locked into this price, but the cost of membership will be going up in the future.

• http://pfblogs.org/pop/feed/ displays the most popular headlines (all topics) from the past 24 hours
• http://pfblogs.org/inv/pop/feed/ displays the most popular investing headlines from the past 24 hours
• http://pfblogs.org/re/pop/feed/ displays the most popular real estate headlines from the past 24 hours
• http://pfblogs.org/pf/pop/feed/ displays the most popular personal finance headlines from the past 24 hours

Thank to Financial Freedumb for the suggestion. For bloggers, a plugin for Wordpress can incorporate these feeds into your sidebar. The feeds can also be loaded into RSS readers like Bloglines.

More requested changes and enhancements are in the works.

Later on, ratings will be stored efficiently in the database so no calculation will be necessary, except on a nightly or weekly basis.