Thursday, May 25, 2006

Apply to be Open Directory Project (ODP) Editor

Today when I recovered my posts, I came across my post about ODP Open Directory Project which aims to produce the most comprehensive directory of the web by relying on a vast army of volunteer editors. I used to apply a few times to become an volunteer editor for ODP, but none success. I finally gave out as I concentrate into blogging for money.

And now I will try to apply again, let's see how hard it's to "volunteer" to become ODP editor. I never fail to volunteer in any social events that I want to volunteer, except ODP. Of course, those who review my application in ODP may feel that I may have "udang di sebalik batu" (in Malay language, which means hidden purpose), as some website owners hope listing in ODP will helps their websites to boost the ranking in search engines, but I guess for most professional seo (search engine optimization) expert out there, ODP is either a miss or they would have ways to get around it.

Blog Been Deleted by Blogger

All my blogs that been hosted by Blogger on BlogSpot server been deleted in one go, without notice or warning or clarification. What happened was when I logged in to Blogger and looked at the Dashboard, I had a rude shock. My dashboard was empty, and all the blogs were gone. And of course, when I tried to access the blog, it returned Blogger: 404 error.

I emailed the Blogger Support, and waited for 3 days before a reply came (may be it's because of weekend, hence the delay, as subsequent correspendence was fast). Alexandar from Blogger Team said "It seems that your blogs were mistakenly targeted by our automated spam classifying system. However, I have checked your blogs and can verify that they comply with our Terms of Service. I was able to restore them to your account, so you should see them the next time you log in. I also cleared them for regular use so that this problem will not recur. Note that you will need to republish your blogs in order for them to be visible online again."

Unfortunately, he helped me to restore all my blogs except this. As I don't have any backup for my posts, so I have to get back all posts from search engines' cached copy, if they're still available. And Google cache is fast dropping the pages from its storage, with now the cached copies on available up to August 2005. So I will try my best to recover and restore previous posts, but some may have gone infinitely.