Yax over at Dungeon Mastering recently put together his list of the top 50 (now 52) RPG websites out there. Coming out of nowhere, Obsidian Portal shows up at #13. Of course, he readily admits that his rankings are totally biased, but that makes it worth even more to me. Rather than trying to quantify why Obsidian Portal is any good, users just like it.
Anyways, thanks Yax for the link and knowing that we exist!
So you want on Technorati, huh? You’ve got a website with blogs or at least something that could be loosely considered a blog, and you want more exposure? Well, you’ve come to the right place! Step on in and I’ll tell you all my secrets of getting XML-RPC pinging to work for you, driving the hordes of the Internet to your doorstep! *
Getting onto the syndication services is not that hard. Or, at least that what’s they say. I have had a devil of a time getting the Obsidian Portal adventure logs to show up. By any standard definition they are blogs, and therefore should not be excluded from the syndication services. Still, here I am after a month with very little to show for it. Worst of all, it’s extremely difficult to track down where I’m going wrong.
Under the assumption that someone out there is in the same boat, here are a few tips to help out. I’ve grouped my tips into two categories. “Concrete Advice” covers tips that could definitely make a difference and should be attempted first. “Shots in the Dark” are some ideas I had that may or may not do anything at all. But if you’re desperate…
Rather than searching out all the services, just use pingomatic. You can add any additional ping targets if you wish, but pingomatic has found some pretty good ones.
Actually testing your pinging is probably the hardest part. You send a ping out into the ether, get a response like “Thanks for the ping!” and then you wait. And wait. And wait.
Sometimes you will have to wait several hours for the blog or post to show up on Technorati. Sometimes it won’t even show up at all. Not knowing if the ping is working is the most frustrating part of the entire experience. That’s where weblogs.com comes in.
Ever hear of weblogs.com? Neither had I, until I started this journey. Apparently, they’re the wackos who came up with this crazy pinging idea in the first place. To boot, they provide the best way of testing whether or not your ping service is working. They have a list of the most recent pings they’ve received available as an XML file. So, here’s how the testing works:
Note: shortChanges.xml seems to be cached on the server side and updated every couple minutes or so, so keep checking if you’re not there right away. After 5-10 minutes, you should either be listed or your ping never made it.
If it’s there, then you can be absolutely sure of 2 very important things:
That may not seem like much, but we can infer (ie. assume) a lot more, namely that pingomatic is forwarding your pings to all the other services. This means that whatever problems you’re having getting registered with the syndication services, it’s not related to your pinging process. So, if you’re still not showing up on Technorati, it’s time to do some more digging.
Ok, now your ping is working, what’s next? Validate your site and your feed!
The first thing a syndication site will do is pull down your feed and spider your site. You want to be as welcoming as possible when that happens. That means having valid, well-formed XHTML for your site and a valid RSS/Atom feed. Both of these are easy enough to check:
They will tell you what’s wrong with your site. Get it whipped into shape so the syndication spiders find what was promised by your ping.
Since we’re using pingomatic, we have our choice of a regular ping or an extendedPing. Just go whole-hog and send the extendedPing. It allows you to specify both the site URL and the associated RSS/Atom URL. Send all the info you can to pingomatic, and let them decided what to forward on to the other guys, depending on who can accept it.
When looking for your posts on the syndication sites, make it easier on yourself, and use a test post with easy to search for text. “Ping test” is going to lump you in with all the other people doing the exact same thing. Instead, stick in a string of nonsensical text like “flatly waking Oberon” that doesn’t show up in a Google phrase search. This will make your tests just a little bit easier to find.
Add a few categories to your post in the RSS feed. A lot of spiders and search engines (as well as blog apps) seem to treat the category field as a place to dump social tags. So, you should too! Even if you have to hard code a few categories in there, go ahead and do it. For the Obsidian Portal adventure logs, every post is tagged with ‘games’, ‘gaming’, ‘rpgs’, and ‘roleplaying.’ Does it help them get picked up? I don’t know. That’s why it’s a shot in the dark.
For a while, I was adding “Obsidian Portal” to the title tag of every adventure log. For the fleeting moments when they were showing up on Technorati, it looked terrible. Suddenly, they all disappeared. It occurred to me that they might have been flagged as duplicates or too similar. Same domain and similar titles. Is that the case? Who knows?
I have not had much luck getting listed with Technorati or any of the other services. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. After about a month of trying, I’m about ready to throw in the towel. I’ll keep the pings going, but I’m not going to devote much more time to testing and analyzing whether or not they’re working.
If you do manage to find the secret to getting listed, please speak up in the comments or write a blog post of your own!
*Author is full of crap and is still unable to get his site’s blogs listed on Technorati. If you know what he’s doing wrong, please post a comment!
In an earlier post on the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs meetup group, I mentioned that I had met some fellow Ruby on Rails hackers from here in Atlanta. They were working on a secret project and didn’t want to publicize it. I can definitely understand the feeling.
Fast forward a few months and now they’re tired of working in the dark. At a certain point, you just have to push it out there and sink or swim. In fact, their business depends on both sinking and swimming. Ha ha, lame. Anyways, if you’re a scuba diver or were ever interested in being one, check them out:
From the guys here at AisleTen, we wish the best of luck to MyNextDive May you find your niche and get your user base!
Following Ryan’s experiences at Barcamp San Diego, I’ve decided to attend and (hopefully) present at Barcamp Atlanta. If I get the chance, I will be doing a presentation on custom Google Maps using S3. I will center on Ruby on Rails, of course, but most of the idea is language agnostic.
I’m hoping to use BarCamp as an opportunity to network with other Atlanta area entrepreneurs and hackers. I’ve got a lot of ideas and the skills to execute them, but I’m looking for people that are better than me in the marketing department. If you’re the kind of person who can sell water to a fish, then look me up at BarCamp!
Here’s a picture of me, looking as I probably will at the conference (lost and confused). Please don’t be shy, just come up and introduce yourself.
Advertising on a teeny budget usually means doing a lot of legwork and posting site material in a lot of places. In many cases, you’re bordering on spam, which is kind of depressing. Plus, it can seem that no matter how much you write, no one ever reads it or follows the links to your site. There is no secret to it, but you just have to keep trying.
Recently, I found TreasureTables, a blog for tabletop RPG Game Masters (GM). In the forums, there is a section devoted to GM resources. Since Obsidian Portal is definitely a resource for GM’s, I went ahead and put up the pitch statement, along with a call for feedback.
Within a day, there were two new campaigns signed up (Dark Skies and Shadows of Skullport), and several people had posted specific, useful feedback regarding the site. Some had even commented on the possible commercial aspect of the site and how much they would pay to use it. Of course, that has to be taken with a grain of salt because it’s much easier to say you’ll pay than it is to actually drop the money.
From the 20 minutes to create the forum posting, and the probably 1-1.5 hours since then updating it as people ask questions, I have been able to generate 2 campaigns and probably 5-6 signups. That may seem small, but for a small site trying to grow, that’s a big deal.
The moral of the story is to keep hammering away at blog comments, forums, and the like. I have learned that “word of mouth” advertising often means your words, your mouth. It can seem frustrating, constantly searching for new places to regurgitate the same pitch over and over, but it is necessary at this stage. Keep marching on and eventually someone will bite.
Update (2007/07/11): It seems that I was pretty far off on this one. I have been suspicious for a while, and should have updated the post with some of my thoughts, but I didn’t. Lucky for me, Zoom, in the comments, took me to task.
Apparently, at some point about two years ago, Google decided to stop refreshing the Google Directory and updated the PageRank algorithm to discount any gains from DMOZ. However, this seems only to affect sites listed after they did this. The end result is that getting listed on DMOZ now seems to have no effect on your score.
Part of the reason my findings were so skewed is that the categories I was looking in were pretty static. They had not changed much in the two years that Google was not updating. So, I never checked the PageRank of a DMOZ listed site of less than two years. In my defense, there seems to be no direct way to see when a site was listed on DMOZ. However, using a more dynamic category might have helped.
Bottom line: DMOZ seems to have absolutely no effect on your PageRank score for newly listed sites. Unless you have a time-machine, it won’t do anything for you. I’d still submit your link, as someone might just stumble upon it by browsing DMOZ, but definitely don’t stress over getting in. There are more important things to worry about.
Original (and flawed) article follows:
While looking for ways to promote our Dungeons and Dragons website, I stumbled upon the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ. I had heard from an SEO expert (see my earlier post on Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs) about submitting a link to DMOZ. However, he just sort of mentioned it in passing. Luckily, I happened to jot down the 4 letters. I guess he just assumed we all already knew about it.
While following up on those notes, I went to the DMOZ site and started browsing around their Roleplaying section. Most of the links are good, and some are excellent. On the other hand, there is a sprinkling of sites that are just plain dumb. Not that I’m in any position to judge anyone else, but seriously folks, an entire site devoted to discussion of how to roll a d3? Funny? Yes. An unbeatable resource for RPG players worldwide? Um, no.
On a whim, I decided to run these sites through a PageRank checker. Imagine my surprise when they all turned up a PageRank of 6! This is equal to the score for The Wizards of the Coast homepage. Sit back a moment and process this: a single page with an ugly background and a crappy poll devoted to how to roll a d3 has the same PageRank as the homepage for the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, the most popular tabletop RPG ever.
Don’t believe me? Then check it out for yourself:
PageRank Checker
How do u D3?
Wizards of the Coast
For fun, I decided to compare the sites in Alexa. Now, Alexa is totally separate from PageRank, and there is no reason to expect any sort of direct correlation. However, it’s reasonable to expect an indirect correlation. After all, high traffic probably implies that there are a lot of links pointing to you, and the more traffic you receive, the more likely you are to receive new links. Reasonable, right?
Anyways, according to Alexa, wizards.com has a reach of 0.03%, meaning that of all the users measured by Alexa, 0.03% of them visited wizards.com. If you think about it, that’s a perfectly respectable number. Predictably, the d3 poll site was not even ranked. Basically, they are orders of magnitude apart in actual traffic. A candle against the sun.
So, what’s the catch? How can they have the same PageRank? The PageRank algorithm is based on the number of incoming links and their respective PageRank scores. If you have highly ranked incoming links, then you are blessed with some of the value of those links. The more you have and the better they are, the higher ranked you are. So, maximizing PageRank is a fairly simple process (in theory): get popular people to link to you.
DMOZ matches up perfectly with this, for one main reason: a single link on DMOZ translates to dozens, perhaps hundreds of links elsewhere. This is due to the fact that DMOZ publishes their directory freely as an RDF feed. Websites are encouraged to pick up the feed and repackage or republish it as desired, with very few restrictions. So, get a link on DMOZ, and you automatically (with patience) get a link on all the sites that pick up their feed.
I checked the d3 website’s incoming links according to Google. To do this, just go to Google and type in link:www.somesite.com. Looking at the results, it’s easy to see that pretty much all of the highly ranked incoming links are repackaged feeds from DMOZ.
While a bunch of free links is already a great thing, there is one massive cherry sitting on top of the pie: Google itself republishes the DMOZ feed as Google Directory! As you can probably imagine, a link from Google to you is a massive PageRank boost, due to Google’s own maximized PageRank value. It’s like getting Batman as a character witness at your trial. His word carries a lot of weight.
Unfortunately (or luckily, depending on which side of the fence you’re on), getting a link in DMOZ is not exactly easy. It’s not hard, either, but it seems to take a while. As of writing this, I have yet to actually get Obsidian Portal listed. Still, if you’re looking for a way to get your site noticed, I can think of no better way to spend the next half hour than by browsing DMOZ, finding the perfect category., and submitting your site. If you’ve got quality content and your site is truly worthwhile, then all you have to do at that point is wait.
Good luck getting listed 
Update (2007/05/29): From what I’ve been reading, expect a very long wait to get listed. Apparently it can take months or even years to finally appear in the DMOZ listings, mainly due to a huge backlog of submissions and very few editors. Still, there are worse ways to spend a half hour of your time than taking a long-shot at what could end up being the perfect link for your site.
Update 2 (2007/05/31): I have been accepted as the editor for the Games - Roleplaying - Software category! My first order of business was to list Obsidian Portal along with the other two sites that were included as part of my application. I had to apply twice in order to be accepted, but the entire process took under a week. So, if you have a site that you want listed, and the correct category has no editor, then your first order of business should be to apply for that category. Otherwise, it will probably take several months in order for someone to get around to actually reviewing your site.
Note: I was completely honest about my affiliations, as well as my intentions, and they apparently did not penalize me for it. So, be honest, be sincere, and good luck!
Recently, I went to a meeting of the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs. They sponsored a presentation by John Sherrod of Primedia regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
All in all, it was a good talk, and I didn’t feel too sleazy for being there. I was worried that an SEO talk would devolve into discussions of how to fool Googlebot into putting you at the top of the list for keywords like ’stud’ and ‘teen.’ Luckily, John stressed one main point on how to best climb the charts: provide high quality, original content that has value to your readers.
Beyond that, he gave many good tips that are applicable across a wide variety of sites. I’ll list off the ones that I was quick enough to write down.
When the search engine spiders reach your page, they will rely on you to navigate them around. The only way they can find their way to all your pages is if there are links providing navigation to the each page. Also important, these links should be text links, not flash. The text of the link helps the spider identify the keywords to associate with the material on the page. Further, some links are incomprehensible, such as Flash or Javascript links. The more plain text you have, the friendlier it is to the spider.
I can’t say much to this one, since I don’t know how the spiders work. John, however, claims that they do not like URLs with lots of query string variables. In any case, these URLs are definitely not friendly to users, and they look ugly in a search result. Instead, allow the URL to express some sort of organization of your site. For example, compare the following two URLs:
http://mysite.com/products/jewelry/gold/diamond-tennis-bracelet
http://mysite.com?cat=44&subcat=92&prodId=2412145
Which one is more descriptive? They could be talking about the same thing, but it’s impossible to tell from the URL.
In the Rails world, URLs like this are fairly easy to achieve, thanks to routing. By implementing a few routes, you are able to clean up your URLs and make them look nice and pretty. Take a quick look at the official manual on routing and you’ll see just how easy it is.
On Obsidian Portal, we are trying to use nice, easy to read URLs for as much as we can. Currently, we’re not doing as well as we could, but that’s mainly because we have so many features we’re trying to implement. Making URLs look pretty is not exactly at the top of the list. However, we have had some success with campaigns and game content. For example, http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/kensing takes you directly to my campaign, called Kensing. In another example, http://www.obsidianportal.com/game_contents/show/memory-steel, takes you to an item I created called memory steel. That URL could use some cleanup, but you get the idea.
The search engines place a lot of weight on the words they find inside the title tag. So, make sure every page has keywords in the title. Personally, I am not a big fan of long, jumbled titles that are just a mish-mash of keywords. Instead, give each page a meaningful title that happens to contain 1 or 2 keywords related to the material presented on the page. This will give it a nice appearance in the search engine result pages.
Before you can get better at anything, you need to know where you currently are. For search engines and page views, you need to establish your current baseline and then track your stats over time. Probably the easiest way to do this is by setting up a Google Analytics account. It provides a nice graphical view of how you are doing over time.
This is an excellent strategy for finding out why your competition ranks better than you. Go to Google and enter:
link:your.competitors.site.com
This will return a list of all the links (that Google knows about) to your competitor’s site. You may discover that they have several high-ranking incoming links that could also apply to you. Track these places down and see if you can get yourself listed there as well.
Besides listening to the SEO presentation, I also met a few Ruby on Rails developers here in Atlanta. Calvin Yu and Neil Green are members of the ATLRUG (Atlanta Ruby Users Group) and they’re working on a new site, but they asked me not to discuss their project just yet, so I’ll keep it under wraps.
Next month’s meeting will be a round-table discussion of various web technologies (such as RoR). I cornered the organizer after the meeting and offered to sit in as a RoR “expert.” Just don’t tell him how little I know 
I went to a Dungeons and Dragons meetup today in order to, well, meetup with other Dungeons and Dragons players. Of course, my ulterior motive was to show of Obsidian Portal a little in the hopes that I could garner a few more subscribers/beta testers.
I have never been a sales person before, so I was a little worried about trying to sell something. Luckily, my wife Sarah, has been through some of this before with her website, Southern Spaces, and had some good advice. Rather than approaching it as a sales opportunity, I should approach the meeting as an opportunity to network with other gamers and talk about our campaigns. Naturally, any discussion of my campaign would lead me to show off the Adventure Log. Then, I could use this as a jumping off point for describing the website.
Sarah’s advice was quite helpful and put me much more at ease. Rather than being a corporate shill trying to sleaze my way into this group, I would be a fellow gamer there to talk about my game. If the opportunity to talk about the site presented itself, then I would take it, but I would not otherwise try to force it.
Still, I think it is useful to set goals, so I told myself that I would try to get five people to sign up for the site, and at least one person to create a new campaign.
Unfortunately, only two other people showed up to the meetup. I blame it on the fact that it was on Easter Sunday. It was truly disheartening. Of the two that showed up, only one was really much of a hardcore player. His name is Logan, and he is currently playing in one campaign and getting ready to start another. I tried to sell him on the idea of hosting his new campaign on Obsidian Portal, but he seemed sort of on the fence. Perhaps if I keep at him, maybe I can convince him to give it a try. I don’t want to be too pushy, but being not pushy enough really isn’t getting me anywhere.
Although the meetup was fun, and I really enjoyed talking to Logan, the final tally of signups was a big, fat zero. That’s not good.
The next Atlanta area D&D meetup is one month away. Hopefully we can get the homepage working by then and perhaps make things a little more usable, with better page flow and perhaps some documentation. Then, assuming the meeting is much larger, I can give it another go at recruiting some local players.
Ok, imagine that you have just created the most awesome website in the world for the greatest game ever, Dungeons and Dragons. Now, also imagine that no one knows about it. That’s about where I am right now.
Obsidian Portal has reached a stage where we are ready to begin beta testing. There is just enough functionality to make the site useful, and all that’s lacking is content. So now, I’m splitting my time between implementing features, adding content, and trying to think of ways to promote the site.
On my wife’s advice, I started looking around for college gaming groups. Lots of D&D groups form around colleges, and often larger organizations also form in order to help students find local games.
I finally managed to contact Mike Roselli of North Carolina State University. He is the president of the Collegiate Association of Table Top Gamers (CATTG), a multi-university organization dedicated to promoting table top gaming (including D&D and RPGs). Mike has expressed a lot of interest in Obsidian Portal, but he has some reservations about the fact that we are a for-profit enterprise. Perhaps I should tell him that we have a long way to go before we see anything that could be considered “profit”
The CATTG presents a wonderful opportunity for OP. If we can get exposure to college gaming groups and develop a core following, it would be excellent. For a shoestring-budget site like ours, the only kind of marketing we can afford is the word-of-mouth viral marketing. Luckily, that’s exactly the kind we want. Hopefully, we are on our way.
I sent out my first beta test invitations today. I chose the Hawkeye Roleplayers Association of the University of Iowa as my first target. It is a small group, but they are trustworthy, hardcore RPG players. My hope is that I will get honest, thought-out feedback as opposed to random flames.
Knowing that I’m about to unleash my creation on the world is both exciting and terrifying. What if they hate it? What if it crashes? What if they say, “Eh, nothing special”? I’ve invested so much time and effort into this that the prospect of failure is a nightmare. It’s inevitable that some will hate it, but will some like it? Could one or two possibly see the potential that I see? Am I really on to something, or was this all a horrible mistake?
I’ll probably be checking my e-mail all night just to see if anyone wants to join up. I might not sleep for days…
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