ORblogs FAQ

ORblogs is a directory of weblogs written by Oregonians. ORblogs also gathers excerpts of alternative local news, commentary, and photography from the Oregon weblogs community.

A weblog is typically a frequently updated personal site with entries listed in reverse-chronological order. Weblogs provide spaces for anyone to speak their mind, and connect people that wouldn't have otherwise met. And to top it all off, they're fun! If you want to find out more about weblogs, I know a good book on the subject. (Warning, this is a plug, I helped write it.)

Oregon is in the Northwestern United States. Take a look.

I moved to Oregon in 2002, and I wanted to learn more about the state from others who lived here. The site started with a simple list of about 50 local weblogs that I knew about in March 2003 and has been growing as an opt-in service since then. I've also been working in the weblog world for a long time, and I want to do what I can to promote local, independent content on the web.

My name is Paul Bausch, I live in Corvallis, Oregon, and my weblog is onfocus.com. You can find out more than you'd ever want to know about me there. I helped create the weblog software Blogger in 1999, and I've been working with weblogs since then. I develop the code that powers ORblogs, maintain the server, provide support, and generally keep the site running. This site is my hobby not my day job. There's no money being made here, and I work on the site in my spare time. (Which has been in short supply lately.)

Some weblog authors put the longitude and latitude of their real-world location inside their weblog as a meta tag within their HTML. If a weblog has one of these meta tags, ORblogs can list what city they're from and show a map of the weblog author's reported location. If you have an Oregon weblog and would like your weblog to be associated with a city, the tags generator page can generate the tag for you.

Some weblog authors offer their site in a syndication format called RSS—and list the location of that file in an auto-discovery tag within their HTML. If both of those pieces are in place, ORblogs can pull the latest post from that RSS file. Most weblog software (including Blogger, Typepad, and Wordpress) automatically include a feed auto-discovery tag for you. Check your weblog software's documentation to see if that's the case for you. If your site doesn't have a feed auto-discovery tag, check out this article about adding one to your blog: How do I set up my blog for RSS autodiscovery?.

Some weblog authors put meta tags in their weblog's HTML that describe what the weblog is about. If a weblog has these meta tags, ORblogs can display some extra information about the weblog. If you have an Oregon weblog, and you'd like to have keywords and descriptions associated with your listing, the Add Meta Tags page can generate the tags for you.

Some Oregon weblog authors notify this site directly whenever they add a new post to their weblog. If you have an Oregon weblog and would like ORblogs to be aware of new posts, use the Ping ORblogs form whenever you add a new post. Using this form is the most direct way to having your site listed as updated.

A post is considered Oregon-related (OR-related for short) if the post contains an Oregon place name. When a post enters the ORblogs system, the site looks for any match in the post like "Portland", "Corvallis", "Grants Pass", "Bend", etc. If there's a match, the post is marked as "Oregon-related". It's not a perfect system, but it's one way to try find posts that are specfically about Oregon. Click the OR-related link at the top of the home page to see the most recent posts that are marked "OR-related".

A click is counted when an ORblogs reader clicks on a post title to read that post at its originating site. So "clicks" refers to the number of times people have clicked from ORblogs to a weblog to read a post. ORblogs links to sites in a number of other ways as well, from the directory and from blog detail pages. However, clicks from those links are not tracked. Only clicks from post titles contribute to a "click count" for a particular post or weblog. Note that there are some measures in place to ensure that a single person can't drive up a click count artificially for a post.

Posts that show up when you click the Popular link at the top of the home page, are posts that have received over six clicks from ORblogs readers. Also, the "Popular Today" post is the single post that has received the most clicks in the last 24 hours. And "Popular OR-related" is the post that's marked Oregon-related that has received the most clicks in the last 24 hours.

The Hot Topics feature here at ORblogs is an attempt to find out what Oregonians are discussing on their weblogs. When a post enters the ORblogs system, the site tries to extract a number of keywords from the text. By watching keywords across thousands of posts each week, ORblogs hopes to determine the most popular topics of conversation. A topic is hot when a number of weblog authors have used the same keyword within the past seven days. The list of Top Movers shows you the most popular keywords within the past 24 hours that aren't also on the most popular list. So the Top Movers list is trying to find new keywords that are popular. You can click a keyword to see other posts that also mention that keyword.

First, check out the information about participating to find out how the process works. Then visit the Add a Weblog page to submit your weblog for review. After approval, all you have to do is learn the secret handshake.

Just send me an email and I'll remove your weblog. Once removed, please forget the secret handshake.

If you've updated meta tags within your weblog, it will usually take ORblogs 24-48 hours to recognize the change. ORblogs looks for updated metadata once every 24 hours. Site icons (favicons) are updated once per week. Screenshots are updated once every 3 months or so—so if you've updated your design, it will take ORblogs a while to update the image on your weblog's detail page. This strict schedule helps minimize bandwidth used.

First, update your meta tags, replace the existing tags in your weblog's HTML, republish, and wait 24 hours or so for ORblogs to find your new information. If you changed URLs, have meta info that isn't being updated, or anything else that seems off—send an email describing your problem.

After you post something new to your weblog, head over to the ping form, plug in your weblog URL, and click Ping ORblogs. ORblogs will check your site feed and pick up any new posts that you've added. You can bookmark the final ping page if you want to ping with one click in the future.

Once you type your weblog URL into the ping form and click Ping ORblogs (or visit your ping bookmark), ORblogs fetches the current version of your site feed. ORblogs then compares the current version with the version it saw last. If the two versions are different, ORblogs then parses your feed looking for new posts. If new posts are found, they're added to the database and will appear on the site.

In January 2008, there were a number of changes here that removed several features including memberships, the discussion forums, and the photo-sharing section. There's a complete explanation of the changes at ORblogs Site News: A Leaner ORblogs.

ORblogs doesn't have a Privacy Policy drafted by lawyers like many large sites have. ORblogs is run by a single individual and I won't use your email address for anything other than communication with you about ORblogs. In the past, ORblogs has included advertising from Google, so you might want to view Google's Privacy Policy regarding their AdSense program. ORblogs also uses the Yahoo! Term Extraction Service to find keywords across posts. You might want to take a look at Yahoo!'s Privacy Policy as well. If you have any questions or concerns about privacy related to ORblogs, send an email and I'll try to answer your questions.

The site code is a combination of scripting environments including ASP/VBScript, Perl, PHP, and Python. I'm using a modified version of Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser and myelin's Feed Normalizer to crunch RSS and Atom. I'm using an ActiveX component called WebPageSnapShot to generate screenshots of weblogs, and a component called ASPJpeg to resize images. I'm also using ImageMagick to create site icons. The Yahoo! Term Extraction Service finds keywords within posts.

City names are provided by GNIS Data in a local database. Maps are provided by the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER/Line site and Google via the Google Maps API. City populations were taken from the Oregon Bluebook site.

Weather data for Oregon cities is courtesy Yahoo! Weather, and the Yahoo! Weather API.

The ORblogs server is hosted at The Planet.

I honestly don't know. It should! If you have feature ideas, send them my way.

Of course not! This site is unique among billions of sites on the Web. But yes, there are several other geography-based weblog directories: Bend blogs, seablogs (Seattle Weblogs), NYC Bloggers, Austin Bloggers, Weblogs.com.ar (Argentina)—just to name a few.