I finally got around to registering a domain and opening this new site I have been working on here and there. I chose the name that was one of my first choices and was one of the highest ranked in the poll I made last week. I decided to choose a name that was beyond the scope of political blogs, to allow future growth and a name not linked to CKA, to hopefully attract new people to it and through it to CKA.

www.bloggingcanadians.ca

The site is open and you can register now, but it is short of content right now, but the framework is there, now i just need to gather Canadian political blogs to add, and inform blog owners to signup on the site and submit their own blog feeds rather than me searching them out.

The site works of the RSS feeds from blogs, so a blog only needs to be added once and then any new post from that blog will be added, and can be viewed, voted and commented on along with all the others.

I am going to spend some time tonight gathering any emails to political bloggers I can find, but feel free to make any suggestions for blogs, or any suggestions for the site. There is still much to improve and add to it.

   

after launching the site I left some things unfinished, including a very important something. The automation of adding new blog entries.

Well it is done now, the site auto updates every 3 hours with any new blogs posted.

I also need to make some headway on getting the word out there to more Canadian political bloggers. The site is new and pretty unknown, but already some have found there way there and signed up.

I also plan on linking the commenting system there to the CKA forums, creating more political discussion.

   

Similar set up to Digg. Good luck with it. Let me know when it's not just about politics.

   

UPDATE

I spent the last couple nights upgrading the backend of the site and adding new stuff.

Un-vote - Now users can un-vote stories they have voted for.

Private Messages - You can add other bloggers to your friends list then have the ability to PM them.

Search for users - On the profile page users can search for other users.

"Reporting/Burying" Stories - Users can bury stories that are spam, inaccurate etc etc. Burying a story grays it out to signify you have buried it.

"Save" stories - A new feature has been added that lets users save or bookmark any stories they want. The stories are saved under a new tab called "Saved" in their profile.

when viewing a story, you can see the total reads and out hits.

I also finally got around to making the "list" page: http://www.bloggingcanadians.ca/canadia ... cal-blogs/ Now to grow this list!


Since I have been away for the last couple months traveling across Canada I was wondering why there was no new join requests in my email inbox. Well it turns out the site wasn't sending the notification emails properly! So if you tried to join in the last 3 months, you were not ignored, you can re-submit your join application now! The "Join" page is fixed, so many new blogs will be added.

I have really neglected this site after creating it.. well mostly because I was gone for 2 months. But I have been and will continue to work on it and promote it. I havn't really done any link submitting or exchanging, but the site has been growing on its own surprisingly. Its getting 300 visitors a day, which isn't too bad for a new site with no promotion.

If you know anyone who writes a political blog, spread the word!

   

help vote for the site here: http://pliggsites.com/blogging-canadians-s-178.html

   

Help out by voting for Blogging Canadians.ca here: http://bloggerschoiceawards.com/blogs/show/23025

Also an update on the site, its been growing slowly but surely. New blogs are joining up almost weekly and last month (Jan) the site had over 12,000 visitors.

   

crazy, bloggingcanadians.ca is the 3rd google result for the term "blogging"
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=blogging right after blogger.com

   

Well one positive thing to come from all the political drama, is it has gotten people talking about poltiics and that means more traffic for political websites.

CKA has had an increase in traffic of 30-40% the last week.
Bloggingcanadians has seen a 50% increase.

But bloggingcanadians still sees fairly low numbers, I don't know how to get it more active. It has ver good Google PR and search rankings that have slowly built up over the last year, but hasn't resulted in large constant traffic.

If anyone has any ideas or is interesting in helping out with that site, let me know.

   

Get Dayseed to contribute.

Get him on a roll about Timmies.