Today’s MovableType tip is pinging weblogs.com whenever your weblog changes. Weblogs.com is a weblog tracker run by the same people who brought you Radio, but it has an open API, so anyone can use it.

MovableType can get you listed on weblogs.com, but it doesn’t do it by default. If you want to ping weblogs.com whenever your weblog changes, log in to your blog, then click “Manage blog”, then “Blog Config”, then “Preferences”. Scroll down to the checkbox that says “Notify weblogs.com of updates”, and check it.

Another page of weblogs.com, the top 100, analyzes the links on the home pages of weblogs that ping it. Since the home page of a weblog generally points to the home page of the tool that created it (many tools require this), this serves as an unofficial way to compare weblog tool popularity. The statistics are skewed by the fact that some weblog tools (Radio) ping weblogs.com by default, while others (MovableType) do not, but even so, MovableType weblogs are in a dead heat with Radio for pings. Today it lists 88 pings from Radio weblogs, 87 from MovableType (79 link to movabletype.org, another 8 link to the common misspelling moveabletype.org with an extra “e”).

Other fun facts from today’s top-100 list:

  1. Out of 88 Radio weblogs, there are 18 links to Userland-proprietary links to New York Times articles. About 20%, assuming 1 link per weblog. Looks like a steady hit.
  2. Out of 88 Radio weblogs, 13 use Google boxes. About 15%. I’m guessing this will drop sharply in the next month.

  3. Out of approximately 200 total weblogs, there are 16 weblogs that link to the XHTML namespace, meaning they use XHTML Strict. (All XHTML Strict documents must point to this namespace, and weblogs.com apparently considers that a link and tracks it.) About 8%.

    It’s a safe bet that none of these are Radio weblogs, since Radio makes it virtually impossible to output XHTML. And Radio weblogs are about half the weblogs on the list, so that would mean that about 16% of weblogs that can be XHTML at all are XHTML Strict. (Later: Sjoerd Visscher clarifies: It’s true that Radio doesn’t help you to output XHTML, but his Radio weblog is XHTML Strict. I stand corrected.)

    MovableType’s default templates are XHTML Transitional, but they do not include any identifying links that would show up in this list. So all of these weblogs with XHTML namespace links are by people who cared enough to put them there. Including Sjoerd.

  4. Of 200 weblogs, 9 link to the W3C HTML referer validator, indicating the author is confident enough in their own HTML skills to offer one-click access for readers to check their markup. About 5%.
  5. Of 200 weblogs, 8 link to the web standards upgrade initiative, indicating the author is an arrogant snob who wants Netscape 4 to die a quick and painful death. About 4%.

It would be interesting to meta-track weblogs.com’s top-100 list to see how these numbers grow or shrink over time. Will they be fads that spike and then fade, or will they get steady growth?

Finally, for those who don’t like weblogs.com for some reason, the cleverly-named blo.gs also tracks weblogs. It contains many (all?) of the weblogs listed on weblogs.com, plus a few others that it tracks manually. You can’t possibly read them all.

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