Blog Creation Order

[docbot]

Since you now have the ability to defined groups of blogs, each group having its own keword lists, feeds, etc., the cron routines to gradually create blogs or activate "batched" blogs should create or activate blogs randomly across all groups, (or at least round-robin) rather than what it is doing now.

The order in which TBS creates blogs appear to be in ID order, i.e., the order in which the groups were created or in which the corresponding keywords were added.

So if you add the keywords for group A, then Group B then Group C, the cron routines appear nibble away at the blogs for group A then move on to group b when those are exhausted, then group c. (or was it in reverse order LIFO style?)

Regardless, I would rather not see 50 Cruise Vacation Blogs before I see my first Dog Training blog, etc, even if they are created gradually, unless there is a reason for doing it this way for stealth SEO.

To get around this I've created all the blogs in batch. Then at least for the first couple of weeks or so I plan to manually activate them randomly across all the groups -- 2 or 3 a day, then let cron take care of just creating posts and pings.

If this is going to mess up TBS internal logic please let me know . Otherwise I'll just keep going.

Thanks Guys, I'm starting to have fun now.

[Omar]

I am not sure i understand what you did and what you would liked to do.

Now when create blogs, no matter if use batch or not, you add a list of keywords. Each keyword get an #id, first is #1, second is #2 and so on.

Batch is activating blogs by #id order. So is you activate 10 each time, you get 1-10, 11-20 and so on.

The groups have no influence here. Groups are just logical grouping of blogs.

If you create a group of 50 blogs now, they will get #1-50. If you later make anothe group, will get id #51-100. If using batch, groups not matter. Blogs are activated based on #. At least it should.. if you noticed something else, let me know..

[docbot]

Yes, that does seems to be the way it is workings now that you mention it. And this suggests another way to work-around the behavior that I'm trying to avoid. So in the light of that knowledge, the  "feature" I am requesting is for TBS to pay attention to the blog groups instead of just using keyword entry order - and here is why.

IIRC, the keywords are entered when you created the groups. I naively entered most of the keywords for groups as I created them. 30-50 for group A then group B, etc. This seems like the natural and less labor intensive way to do it.

But that means that to get a natural growth of blogs (the mix of topics in the groups), you would create each group with just a handful of key-phrases each. the go back and add 2 or 3 keywords to Group A, then the same for to Group B etc. then repeating the cycle until you have used up all of your words.

This still seems to be just a _little_ more labor intensive that it needs to be. TBS *is* a useful tool whose reason for existence is reducing repetitive grunt work, so requesting this certainly seems consistent with that.

Granted keywords entry order makes sense before groups were added. But now that you have opened that particular can of worms (a good metaphor for software development, BTW), requesting this additional blog creation logic  also seems to be consistent with the other "gradual growth" features in the product.

I know. There's no rest for the wicked.

[Omar]

Well.. that does indeed makes sense.. but it may complicate the settings and menu a bit more.

You know... to make everybody happy, you have to support all the posible ways that people want to use.. and doing that, the interface get more and more complicated, risking to have them all dissatisfied instead of pleased.

Anyway, getting to your suggestion, there are few things need to be cleared.

The process you explained is like "..you would create each group with just a handful of key-phrases each. the go back and add 2 or 3 keywords to Group A, then the same for to Group B etc..."

Sounds simple, but can't automate getitng "handful of keywords" or "add 2-3 blogs". It needs to deal with some exact algo. Even have few alternatives. You want it that way, somebody wants is other way. You want 3, somebody wants 5, etc.. There are inputs that need to be specified, and a specific behavior based on each input.

That would not be really hard to brainstorm and cover most possibilities, but have to think how to make it, where to put it, in best way so it will not complicate things and risk getting into issues that i mentiond in the beginning.

[docbot]

I'm all for keeping the UI simple so instead of automating my work-around, I am really interested in just having something that would appear plausible as organic growth among the different keyword groups.

So if you could just pick X random blogs (not in keyword id order) to activate, ignoring the groups altogether, that would probably be close enough for meeting that goal.

The randomness would take care of distributing the blogs among the groups and would activate them evenly among the groups over the long term, but not exactly so - one group might get more blogs activated for a while and another group would be "unlucky" for a while.  

Groups with fewer keywords would be less likely to have a blog activated on any given round. No problem. So it would end up looking fairly organic.

The only new setting would be to allow the administrator to select the old way or the new way (randomized).