Blog Flux Review
Blog Flux is a new blog directory that offers five kinds of services:
Blog Directory
Button Maker
PageRank Checker
Pinger
Subscription Service
Overall, there are several things I like about this site. First off, the design is very clean and simple. A lot of blog directories look cluttered and often have HTML wrapping problems. I have not found such problems with Blog Flux. Second, everything is easy. Sign up is easy, finding blogs in the directory is easy, etc. This two items alone could set Blog Flux apart.
With that said, I would recommend that they do something to spruce up their home page. It is TOO clean. The home page consists of five links to the services listed above. Thats it. It would behoove them to make their homepage a place that explains their services. It can still be clean and simple. As it stands now, users are essentially faced with a bare page. Not good.
The Blog Directory contains just under 1500 blogs. Yes, this directory is still in its infancy. Users can find blogs via category, tags, search, language or country. Like mentioned above, viewing every page is a pleasant experience, even the Blog Information page. Everything is very tidy. The information page includes a short description of the blog, categories the blog can be found in within the directory, tags attached to the blog, links to syndicate the blog in your favorite aggregator (very handy), the five latest posts (very helpful), and a place that users can place comments about the blog.
The one problem with the directory is that a lot of blogs submitted themselves to EVERY category. Major problem. This lessens the usefulness of the directory. It would be better if blog owners were limited to submitting their blog to just 3 or 4 categories. The future of any directory depends on its usefulness. If I click on the Genealogy category and find nothing that truly relates to genealogy, what good is that? Having a neat and clean interface can not overcome this issue.
Blog Flux includes its own blog subscription service. Subscribing to blogs within the directory will add them to your own personal repository. Blog Flux will email any new items found on those blogs. I guess this depends on the user. Some prefer an RSS Reader, others may prefer seeing news items in their email. I prefer the former.
Blug Flux also includes a Ping service. However, it does not serve as many sites as Ping-o-matic does.
The Button Maker and Page Rank Checker are both worth checking out but I will cover those in seperate reviews.
Is submitting to Blog Flux worth it? I am for as many possible sources of traffic as possible. However, there are some concerns about the usefulness of the directory which may make its current usefulness shortlived. Submit now, and hopefully they will correct some of the issues I mentioned above.
Posted by Paul Flyer on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 in RSS Solutions
Ahmed Farooq Says:
August 18th, 2005 at 8:33 pm
Thanks for your review. It helps us make our service better
Category spam has been a problem, and we were discussing ways to combat it. From now on (and this applied to previous blogs also), all blogs are allowed to be listed in a maximum of 10 categories. Furthermore, in the case where a blog is listed with incorrect information, we have added a report link to each weblog. This allows our users to effectively act as our moderating team, ensuring that quality remains high.
We have also added a bit of information to the main http://www.blogflux.com page. Hopefully it is more to your liking
Our Pinger can be considered version 0.5. In the next week will be introduction ’1.0′ – an XML-RPC server, alongwith 50 sites to ping (categorized as Generalized, Specialized, Language Specific. If you saw our control panel and the quick link to the Pinger, we will automatically read your language and country settings, and when you click Ping, automatically select the appropriate services to ping
)
I look forward to your reviews of our Button Maker and Page Rank Checker (which caches all pagerank values for fast response – reset every PR update).
» Button Maker by Blog Flux :: Recommended Web Tools Says:
November 7th, 2005 at 10:26 am
[...] I have reviewed Blog Flux a few months back and found it to be a very handy resource. I wanted to take time during this post and my next to review two other tools that Blug Flux offers. [...]