bored of education

Trackback pings

I forgot to put in trackback pings on my previous post. I wanted to see what happens to my lens' ranking when they get pinged.

Right now the Best Harry Potter Sites lens is ranked #2,571 overall and #77 in entertainment. (This is about the best it gets by updating it almost everyday for almost two weeks. It now needs traffic, links, pings, etc.)

My Links and Lenses is #7037 overall.

Blogcritics and Google

The staff at Blogcritics.org sure know how to maximize the features at google. I've only made one post at blogcritics and now if you search for the terms "bored of education" or "books math education" my blog comes up on the first or second page of results. Even a search for "mugglenet" brings up my blog at the number two spot.

It's almost frightening. I feel like the student who doesn't want to do well on a test. Because if he does, people will continue to expect high marks, and he doesn't want the added pressure.

I didn't feel any pressure when only a few friends were reading. Now I can see that if I promote it properly, I could develop a much larger audience. Before I do so I need to do some maintenance. First, I need to reorganize my sidebars so they are easier to navigate. Second, I need to upload some graphics to make it look nicer. Finally, I need to create a useful profile with contact information.

Before I do these things I'm only going to make the minimum number of posts at blogcritics. (I signed up to review four books. Since the publishers' agents are sending them to me I feel I should review them as soon as possible regardless of the state of my blog.)

Anyway, I've got a lot to do. Its a good thing I'm on spring break.

Technorati Tag Test

For those who don't know, the website technorati watches over 7 million weblogs and tracks over 863 million links.

They offer a service called tags. The idea is that when I update my weblog, a link is added under the appropriate tag. People who are browsing through the technorati tags might see the link to my blog and visit.

It is a great way to promote a site with interesting content. (I don't pretend, yet, to have interesting content. I'm still just figuring out the technology.)

I want to see if it works by placing this entry in the blogging tag.

So if you came to my site via technorati, post a comment whether it worked or not.

Who Let the Blogs Out?

I still haven't figured out how to do the normal associate links to amazon.com. But I think I figured out how to link to a specific book.

I decided to link to Who let the Blogs Out? by Biz Stone since it is the book that inspired me to start blogging.

When the link creation site at Amazon didn't work I went looking elsewhere for help and I found this site which had this entry explaining some of URL language used at amazon.

Anyway, now that I have a link to Who let the Blogs Out? one of my two readers should go and buy it. (Mostly to see if the associates thing works...Although I could use the 50 cents.)

Amazon Associates Test

I just signed up to be an Amazon Associate. The signup part was easy. (Although I was a little nervous about giving them my Social Security number.) The difficult part has been posting a link on my sidebar.

Until I figure out how to do that I'm going to try and post a link here...

Update: Link failed and I have deleted it.

Better than Blogrolls

On my other blog. I had set up a blogroll using blogrolling.com. It was fairly easy to do... The difficult part was to get the format of the blogroll to match the format of the other sidebar items. (In fact I never did get it to match. I'm more interested in spending my time developing worthwhile content than I am in making it beautiful. Sorry...)

Typepad makes blogrolling easy. (Only they don't call them blogrolls. They're called lists...which seems unnatural!) I just setup a list of websites that have lesson plans which teach math as problem solving. I'll talk more about them later. (I'm on vacation and don't want to think about math.)

First Post, Second Blog

I started my first blog in January. It turns out that blogger doesn't quite meet my needs. My math department needs to have a multiple author blog that is password protected and blogger doesn't allow password protection. So...I decided to setup multiple blogs with typepad. It does cost 15 dollars a month but that seems reasonable for the number of blogs I have in mind.

Right now I'm at school and I'm waiting for four students to leave so that I can. However, they are not getting the hint....