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I've been visiting http://blogoverflow.com/ occasionally and noticed that our community blog stopped showing up. How is membership on the front page decided?

To the community: do we care if we show up on the blog overflow front page or not? How else can we advertise the blog?

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    $\begingroup$ I already have said this: I personally don't mind if we don't show up on the front page. :) $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh Mod
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 7:50
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    $\begingroup$ @Kaveh: Could you give a rationale please? I would be fine with being featured on the "We Hate Everything and Worship Evil" blog. Traffic is traffic, and most people viewing the blogoverflow page are likely to have some computer or tech background. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 15:08
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    $\begingroup$ I agree with @Aaron, especially early on it seems like its important to get all the traffic we can. It can't affect the quality of the blog in a negative way. Especially since we manually approve all comments! Although it would be annoying to be features on the "Royal Society of Internet Trolls" blog. $\endgroup$
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 15:14
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    $\begingroup$ @Aaron, I think the TCS blog aggregator is much more helpful than being on the front page. Most people coming to the front page won't be able to follow our posts anyway and won't visit the blog again. I don't see traffic for the blog as very important. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh Mod
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 17:09
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    $\begingroup$ Furthermore, it seems that the link from our main site to the blog should always be there. Otherwise, people won't know we even have a blog unless they happen to visit the site within two days of a post. $\endgroup$
    – Lev Reyzin Mod
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 18:19
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    $\begingroup$ @Lev: See the bottom of cstheory.stackexchange.com. It may be harder to find than it should be, but a link is always there. $\endgroup$
    – Tsuyoshi Ito
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 18:59
  • $\begingroup$ @Tsuyoshi, thanks. Yes, it's definitely harder to find than it should be! :) $\endgroup$
    – Lev Reyzin Mod
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 19:05

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I definitely care that we should show up on the main blog page. Location means traffic and google rank, and that automatically gets more people visiting.

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  • $\begingroup$ Do you think the broken feed is what is affecting our (non)appearance in the TOC aggregator? $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 20:21
  • $\begingroup$ Is there a broken feed ? $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat Mod
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 22:26
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    $\begingroup$ @Suresh: Yes, see this answer + comments. $\endgroup$
    – Jukka Suomela
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 22:45
  • $\begingroup$ −1. Gaining the rank in Google is the worst motivation for a link. $\endgroup$
    – Tsuyoshi Ito
    Commented Aug 28, 2011 at 17:17
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    $\begingroup$ Oh please. gaining google rank means we show up in searches in a prominent position, which means more researchers looking for information might come our way. I don't see any downside to getting a link. In any case, looks like it's all fixed now. $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat Mod
    Commented Aug 28, 2011 at 18:51
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It looks like there's something in one of the posts that is breaking the feed.

http://cstheory.blogoverflow.com/feed

Yes, you should definitely be on the Blog Overflow homepage.

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    $\begingroup$ You can see the offending part highlighted here: validator.w3.org/feed/… – there is a "form feed" control character after "There is no algorithm to compute, from a". This is clearly a bug in the blogoverflow.com system; it should never output broken XML code. $\endgroup$
    – Jukka Suomela
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 19:22
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks @Jukka. To Rebecca Chernoff: Overall, the blog system's handling of <blockquote> seems a little off. In that same post, I had to remove the blockquotes when I was actually quoting, because they would not permit paragraph breaks inside blockquotes, or in adjacent blockquotes. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 19:50
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    $\begingroup$ @AaronSterling It's standard WordPress and their feed. I can try to look into this at some point, but I won't be hurt if someone beats me to it. $\endgroup$
    – Rebecca Chernoff Mod
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 21:00
  • $\begingroup$ @Rebecca: I've used <blockquote> in exactly the same way (i.e., using the quote function in the visual editor) in my Wordpress.com blog, and I've never broken my feed, and I get multiple paragraphs inside a block quote when I want to render a display that way. There is something different between StackExchange rendering and Wordpress.com rendering of the same functionality. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 21:25
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I fixed the feed. At least this link, originally supplied by Jukka, says we check out.

There were two breaks. The first, noted in the comments to the answer by Rebecca Chernoff, was a form feed that appeared in a post of mine. The other break appeared in an earlier post by Artem (on the negative adversary method). In both cases, I erased and retyped into the blog, in the HTML window, the characters that appeared there. (One of Artem's references was producing an error.)

So I'm not sure how to avoid this in the future, but things seem repaired for now.

EDIT 2: We now appear on blogoverflow, and the TOC Aggregator. The traffic is picking up.

BUMP for EDIT 3: New post up, it took about an hour for it to appear on blogoverflow and for the flag to appear on CSTheory. Those are now in place, but it is not on the TOC Aggregator. The feed checks out valid.

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  • $\begingroup$ was it [Rei11]? Right now that reference is broken (it is supposed to have a link to Ben's slides but right now it has a malformed a-tag). I would fix the error myself, but I don't have high enough privileges to edit published posts. $\endgroup$
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Commented Aug 26, 2011 at 0:09
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    $\begingroup$ note that your fix of XML now also returned us to the blogoverflow home page (we were one of those 3 empty slots on the front page; this means there are two other blogs out there that are still broken!) $\endgroup$
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Commented Aug 26, 2011 at 0:11
  • $\begingroup$ @Artem: It was your [BSS03] reference that caused the problem, for a reason not clear to me. I repaired the Rei link, hopefully where you wanted it. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Commented Aug 26, 2011 at 14:41
  • $\begingroup$ Nice ! that's good. And great post Aaron, btw. $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat Mod
    Commented Sep 1, 2011 at 6:42
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    $\begingroup$ Note that the most recent post on the aggregator is mine, from 20 hours ago, so it might take some time to update. $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat Mod
    Commented Sep 7, 2011 at 21:04
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I do not care the absence on the top page of blogoverflow.com itself because I do not think that many people visit the top page. (I cannot see the target of the top page other than those who are interested in the notion of “Stack Exchange community blogs.”) However, if the community blog of cstheory.stackexchange.com does not show up there because the blog has something wrong, then it is worth knowing what is wrong.

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I was roaming around WordPress.com and noticed that if you go to your Dashboard (if you are an admin) and then to "Settings" and then to "Writing" there is a checkbox called "WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically". I am not 100% sure what this means, but maybe toggling this checkbox will fix our problem?

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks, it is explained here, I toggled the checkbox, we can toggle if we see it is breaking other plugins. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh Mod
    Commented Sep 1, 2011 at 10:46

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