Thanet Bloggers and the Thanet Blog List

This week I?ve been happy to see that my good friend Hannah has started a blog and that it has got past the all too familiar ?single post then forget about it? stage that many blogs get too. In fact she has been rather prolific these past few days and it?s great to see someone so animated when it comes to the wonders of blogging when I?ve been doing it for almost six years (started May 2004).

Hannah?s start to blogging has also inspired the return of another good friend Andy who last blogged in 2007, but we shall have to see if he gets past the initial first post.

This all takes me to the Thanet Blog List, which I took over from Kevin in September 2006 and initially spent quite a lot of time on, including the switchover to WordPress which allowed more scope for development. One of the big developments was a live feed from listed blogs as a sub page and this proved to be very popular, so much so that many people would by-pass the home page to go to the live feed. Last year Blogger, the company that hosts many local blogs, introduced a feed-widget for users to show pretty-much the same on their blogs with whatever blogs they wanted, and so it was time for the TBL to step up.

Last year I moved the live-feed to the front page, which meant the focus was on blogs that were actually updating rather than those who gave-up the ghost and were maybe still listed but not updating. This went well but there were still-hiccups until I used new plugins for WordPress which offered better options for the huge amount of blogs that were listed. I also edited the template so that readers would only be faced with a short excerpt from the blog feed which would entice them to click the links to visit the actual blog, directing visitors to Thanet blogs which of course was the main aim of the Thanet Blog List to start with.

I also brought in Twitter and now the live feeds from Thanet Blogs goes out on so people can keep in touch.

Now all I need to get new Thanet blogs listed is add the URL of a blog to the back-end of the TBL and everything else is automated. If you have a blog that isn?t listed then let me know and get more exposure for your blog.