http://blog.pfblogs.org Updates and concerns about pfblogs.org, the ad-free personal finance blogs aggregator. Mon, 19 May 2008 01:58:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If your blog contains anything that the pfblogs.org Advisory Panel believes is spam, a blog will not be eligible for membership in the Friends of pfblogs.org. If the spam is not removed or resolved, the offending blog will be removed from all listing on pfblogs.org. Or policy on spam, or ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2008/05/18/our-policy-against-spam/ For those who noticed that over the last day or so, only Friends of pfblogs.org were listed on the front page, please be assured that this was not intentional. It was a result of a programming mistake. The problem has been fixed and the front page listings have ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2008/05/12/technical-difficulties-resolved/ We added the 1,000th blog to the pfblogs.org aggregator today. Wow, the blogosphere, and the personal finance niche in particular, has certainly expanded in the past two years. There are some new features that I've been working on, and some already exist that you may not know about. ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/12/27/pfblogsorg-now-indexes-1000-blogs/ Increased instability at DreamHost, even after upgrading hardware, has forced us to move pfblogs.org to a virtual dedicated server elsewhere. You should no longer have any problems accessing the website once the changes have fully propagated throughout the Internet. This will also improve viewing the pfblogs.org feeds and ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/11/21/moving-to-a-new-server/ You may have noticed a conspicuous thermometer gracing the pages of pfblogs.org and a number of personal finance blogs. This thermometer is measuring donations within a campaign to fund personal finance lessons in public schools. HC at One Big Mortarboard has organized a campaign to raise a total ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/10/08/pfblogsorg-financial-literacy-challenge-at-donorschoose/ One of the best ways for Friends of pfblogs.org to share links and ensure they are getting the most out of their small membership fee is to install the pfblogs.org Blogroll on their blog and encourage others to do the same. Chances are you already have links to blogs ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/08/18/install-the-pfblogsorg-blogroll/ In the last week, I've made some programming improvements to pfblogs.org which should improve speed when viewing the site directly. I'm still looking for a MySQL "expert" to assist. If you know of anyone, please send her my way. More enhancements will be on the way in ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/08/16/further-improvements/ This weekend, our web host, DreamHost, moved pfblogs.org as well as a number of other servers to a new location. Since that move, the fetching software has become unreliable. I've devised a temporary work-around until it is feasible to move the aggregator to a new location. If you have ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/07/16/server-stability/ Maybe you joined the Friends of pfblogs.org during last year's annual campaign. Perhaps you were an early adopter and got your gold star when it was a free option. If so, your membership may be expiring in April. If you do not have a monthly or yearly ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/02/28/renew-your-membership-in-the-friends-of-pfblogsorg/ pfblogs.org is supporting a new WordPress blog hosting service located at MyPFblogs.com. This will be a great way to start a new blog with reliable software or move a current blog from Blogger and BlogSpot. Here are some of the features. MyPFblogs uses the popular WordPress blogging software. The websites ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/02/07/new-free-wordpress-blog-hosting-service/ The load on the server has been very high, so we have instituted a 10-minute cache on most pages on pfblogs.org. In most cases, you shouldn't notice anything other than fewer server errors and hopefully a marked speed increase in general. The click counts for entries will be ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2007/01/11/new-most-pages-are-cached-every-10-minutes/ If you're interested in top ten blogs lists, then you should check these out. Flexo has posted the Top 10 Blogs by Total Clicks and Top 10 Blogs by Clicks per Post. Here's a little bit about what we have in store for 2007. * User accounts. Create your ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/12/07/some-blogging-statistics-on-pfblogsorg-new-features-coming/ It seems that over the Thanksgiving holiday, we've been experiencing some technical difficulties. The fetching software hosted at MediaTemple has stopped functioning properly. I'm flying back in to town tomorrow, so I should be able to fix the issues over the weekend. In the mean time, I've ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/11/25/technical-difficulties/ DreamHost hosts the pfblogs.org web server and database. I've been a customer of theirs since 2001, and the last two years or so have been rough. We're sticking with them for now, but the fetching software will not run. The RSS parser seems to use significant CPU ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/11/17/stability-in-fetching-and-something-new-on-the-horizon/ I sent out the first email to those who expressed interest in the pfblogs.org Advisory Panel. We could still use a few more voices, so if you're interested (and you've been involved with the personal finance blogging community for a while), send an email to webmaster at this domain. Update: ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/11/07/advisory-panel-getting-this-party-started/ I'd like to focus on expanding the real estate and investing sections of pfblogs.org during the month of November. The real estate section can include blogs about the housing bubble, Realtors' blogs, real estate investing, purchasing a home, etc.. In the investing section, we will include blogs about ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/11/01/expanding-real-estate-and-investing-sections-new-server-added/ This will hopefully be the final change to the "pinging" process for a while. When a blog pings pfblogs.org to let us know that there is an update to be fetched -- a feature available only to Friends of pfblogs.org -- there is a two minute delay. If ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/11/01/more-pinging-changes/ A change to the pinging programming is causing a problem, and I won't be able to fix it until this evening. Until then, pinging is disabled. Feeds will still be fetched on the regular schedule. Update: Pinging service has returned, including the 5 minute delay for those using Feedburner. ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/10/30/pinging-temporarily-disabled/ As you may know, Friends of pfblogs.org have the option of pinging the pfblogs.org server to let the site know when a new entry has been posted. However, when a blogger uses Feedburner, the RSS feed doesn't always contain the new post before it is fetched by pfblogs.org. Therefore, for ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/10/29/pinging-pfblogsorg-and-using-feedburner/ If you have not become a member of the Friends of pfblogs.org yet and you've been meaning too, don't forget that the monthly price will be raising for non-commercial members on November 1. The link to your blog itself is worth $110 to $145 according to LinkWorth, and non-commercial ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/10/20/last-few-days-of-2-per-month-membership/ Thanks to everyone who informed me of their interest in the pfblogs.org Advisory Panel. I'll be contacting a bunch of you in the next few weeks to send you more information and get things started. There's now a simpler way to request listing on pfblogs.org. It's as simple as ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/10/18/getting-listed-on-pfblogsorg/ I'm looking for a few good (and historied) bloggers to join the pfblogs.org Advisory Panel. Email the webmaster at this domain if you're interested, and I'll pass along more information regarding the plans for the Panel. http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/10/04/the-pfblogsorg-advisory-panel/ Out of curiosity, I logged into LinkWorth to see how much a link on every page within pfblogs.org would go for. Take a look at the results and see for yourself: Their estimates may be a little high, but here's the skinny. A link on every page within ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/09/28/being-a-friend-of-pfblogsorg-is-a-great-value/ This should be a welcome update for those who like to see their blog entries make their way to pfblogs.org faster than the normal 30 minute fetching cycle. If your blog software supports it, you can now ping pfblogs.org's server to fetch your feed. Get your numerical blog ID ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/09/20/ping-pfblogsorg-to-update-your-blog/ Sorry if pfblogs.org seems a little sluggish today. The server seems to be handling some database queries slower than usual. Hopefully the problem will take care of itself. http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/09/11/server-is-slow-today/ A splog is a blog consisting of spam. It's often hard to tell splogs from true blogs, but splogs will not be listed on pfblogs.org and any subscriptions for membership in the Friends of pfblogs.org initiated by owners of splogs will be refunded. Pfblogs.org exists to serve as ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/09/06/saying-no-to-splogs/ On October 1, the price of Commercial Membership in the Friends of pfblogs.org will increase. The price for those bloggers whose blogs implicitly or explicity promote a product or products will see the monthly price increase from $35 to $50. Current Commercial and Non-Commercial Friends will not see ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/08/29/commercial-membership-price-increase/ If you happen to come across a blog listed on pfblogs.org that is inappropriate for listing based on the guidelines listed in the FAQ (spam, not personal finance, etc.), please let us know privately. With almost 600 blogs included and more than one third of those posting new entries ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/08/19/the-community-patrol/ For those who love RSS, especially with its ability to be incorporated directly into blogs for sidebars, etc., we have created four new pfblogs.org RSS feeds. Here are the details. 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 ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/08/11/four-new-pfblogsorg-rss-feeds-available/ You may have noticed that pfblogs.org runs much faster this morning. I analyzed some of the database queries last night and came to the conclusion the site was running very inefficiently in some cases, particularly the way ratings were calculated. With 25 entries displayed on a page, and ... http://blog.pfblogs.org/2006/07/27/the-need-for-speed-enhancements/