A small housekeeping announcement: when we revamped this site, we removed the list of links to the latest blog posts on Lib Dem Blogs as the list was slow to load, took up a lot of space and only showed posts for a very short period of time (given the volume of posts over on Lib Dem Blogs).
Many readers have said though that they appreciated the convenient links through to other Liberal Democrat blogs, so we are testing out a Lib Dem Blogs button in the right-hand column, just under the latest poll. This gives you a clickable pop down list of all the current blogs listed over on that site.
Meanwhile, do remember that people other than our regulars are welcome to contribute to this site. Particularly for new bloggers, this can be an effective way of drawing the attention of a wider audience to your blogging skills.
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11 Comments
I’ve just had a look at Statcounter. Out of the last 500 visits to my site, precisely 0 came from Lib Dem Voice. You used to be one of my better sources of traffic.
Is this other Lib Dem bloggers’ experience?
Sorry, I really don’t want to have to trawl through a list of, at a guess, 150 bloggers to see who has recently posted something – I haven’t got time. The list of recent posts used to be a really useful feature of LibDem Voice and I frequently looked at Jonathan Calder’s latest, so he’s absolutely right. So what if it was slow to load and changed quite rapidly?
224 actually – or thereabouts.
i agree with Jonathan. I have lost traffic and I am visiting fewer sites, because I am not being tempted by titles of posts.
If the list cannot be reinstated, then at least make the button go through to the LDB site, so you see the latest posts. Quite a few blogs on that list have not been updated for a while and those blog more frequently are being buried under a list of people who have done nothing but have alphabetically more useful names.
I’ve just done a double check and LibDemBlogs is still there showing all the latest posts in order of the time they were posted. I was able to access the site by tying the url http://www.libdemblogs.co.uk in to the address bar of my browser, by clicking on LibDemBlogs in my bookmarks and by clicking on the button to the right and then clicking on the link (which is already there) which says “In association with LibDemBlogs”.
I must confess that I Blog for two reasons; one to communicate with my local audience and secondly with a wider LD universe. I’ve not checked my stats, but if few LD’s are now looking at my Blog (and I had three posts in the top 100 last year) I don’t really see the point in continuing to Blog. After all, I have my My Councillor website to communicate with my local audience.
This change in the way LDV works seems to be a very retrograde step. Why can’t this list be there. So it’s a little slow to load. Are we all in such a hurry? This seems to me to be a change which could sharply reduce the number of LD bloggers and reduce diversity and discourage new people. A sort of Internet Rennardism?
Ryan, I really appreciate all the hard work that you’ve put into improving the site (and there’s too little appreciation expressed to people who put so much into the Party). But this particular aspect has undoubtedly made it more difficult for people to keep in touch with what other LibDem bloggers are saying. OK, there are ways of accessing the information, but the statistics seem to be proving that unless access is as simple as it used to be then people who come to LDV just won’t bother to see what other people are writing. I usually look at LDV every day – sometimes more frequently if I have contributed to a thread – and being able to glance at the side bar with the most recent posts was simple and easy, and took up no time. That is absolutely necessary when everyone is so busy.
We should all be a bit more impatient for improvements – there’s an election coming!
As for the traffic sourcing, I know I’ve picked up Liberal England so I can get there with one less pageload, so that might explain something.
Martin, the thing with the internet is that people won’t wait for a slow website to load.
Also the ranking for “best posts” are calculated by the number of people clicking on the title on LibDemBlogs. If they visit your site via a bookmark, someone elses posts or even a link in the sidebar of LDV these don’t count towards the scores.
Tony, but the stats aren’t proving anything. August is always a slow month, and whilst there is going to be a drop in the number of incoming hits via LDV, people aren’t showing that this has had an impact on the number of [August] visitors.
And I will repeat if you go to http://www.libdemblogs.co.uk not only will you see the most recent 10 posts, but all those from today and yesterday in case you might have missed some.
Ryan, can you not use memcache to cache a local copy of the libdemblogs box html for ten minutes at a time or so? Even if your host doesn’t let you run memcache, you could still build the blog html and store it as a file – that should be almost as quick as memcache anyway, since the server OS should end up cacheing the file in memory for you anyway.
It seems to have reappeared in any case. Which is good news IMO.