Eish!!: Help required for posting to Amatomu

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Help required for posting to Amatomu

So, today is a nice slow day. Slap bang in the middle of what most people have made into a mega-long weekend.
I have noticed however that there are a few hardcore bloggers still posting and reading the blogs. (MyBlogLog is a whole lot cooler than I thought it would be)

So I thought I would take the gap, and ask some advice. But before I do let me warn those of you non-bloggers that this is not going to interest you. I am not a fan about blogging about blogging for the sake of blogging (and Amatomu rankings) so non-bloggers do yourself a favour and click here.

So, fellow, bloggers, here's my question. While I have readers from all over the world, I would like my main audience to be South African. Either those currently staying here in SA, those currently working elsewhere in the world, or ex-pats. I feel it's important to aim at a target market and not get drawn into trying to compete with the international bloggers. It will also allow me to pitch the blog to advertisers one day, should I decide to do so.
With this in mind, Amatomu becomes a very important tool. It's local focus means that the majority of the referrals coming from this portal are going to be local readers.
Thus the "Latest Posts" column offered by Amatomu on it's opening page becomes vitally important. This is the first thing casual surfers are going to use as a reference and it's an important leveler needed by the smaller blogs as the exposure they get is exactly the same as
the 'bigger' blogs.
When I first signed up with Amatomu they accepted your blog posting time as gospel. I found this out is my Blogger timezone was out of synch and I found myself sitting on top for hours with a post time way in the future. (Sorry, Vince & Matt) I eventually got that right, but others had cottoned on by then and took advantage of the loophole. Fortunately, they have sorted this out by assigning a random time if you post with a time that is in the future.
Now, my question. How do you ensure that you get the current time as the time posted? I have found that very often, despite constant pinging, it will take 20mins before a post will show up in the "Latest Posts" lists. By that time you are already way down the list. Clearly some of you have figured out how to get it right, so please share. I tried setting my time 15mins ahead, but that just got me penalised as it went through after 10mins and I landed up 3/4s of the way down the list anyways.
Help!

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Posted by eishman on Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 1:40 PM |

Click here to see your ship come in.

More local traffic, register a .co.za for your blog & use it as your blogspot URL.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous | April 29, 2007 at 2:09 PM  

Agreed, working on that one. Coming soon...

Posted by Blogger eishman | April 29, 2007 at 2:27 PM  

One possible solution would be for Amatomu to assign a polling time to each blogger when they sign up. Clearly Ama cant poll all blogs at the same time and clearly they cannot poll too often so once every 20 minutes sounds reasonable to me, but if in addition they told you when exactly that period starts you could time your posts to be just before the poll. This would be the only fair way of giving people equal visibility on the new list.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous | April 29, 2007 at 3:55 PM  

Interesting that you bring up times and posting - I have an article in the making for that very topic over at Webtrepreneur. I am currently looking into the whole thing, and when I have some decent/relevant information, I will post it.

Times are so crucial, hitting the first post after 12pm increases traffic nicely, landing in the middle isn't too great. So ye, I'm doing some research.

.co.za domain mate.. that'll help a hell of a lot. I totally agree about keeping it local - I am also aiming to try and keep things as local as possible.

Keep well bud,
The Webtrepreneur.co.za

Posted by Blogger ChrisM | April 30, 2007 at 3:03 AM  

Thanks Chris, looking forward to article.

Posted by Blogger eishman | April 30, 2007 at 7:51 AM  

Hi guys, a few points

We use the publish date as it is listed in the RSS feed unless that date is set in the future. If it is set in the future we pick an arbitrary time during the past two hours.

I would suggest checking that your blog is outputting dates and times in the correct timezone (a common problem with blogger.com users whose templates don't show publishing times, just dates).

The ping is the way to bypass the polling process, but this relies on your posts having the correct time in them.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous | April 30, 2007 at 3:16 PM  

Thanks Vincent,
Perhaps my problem is the lack of a result you are getting from pinging blogger itself?
Again seems to point to me getting myself into gear and getting a domain name registered and my own webspace.

Posted by Blogger eishman | May 1, 2007 at 2:35 PM  

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