I’ve had a few mails from people whose blogs have not been approved after a few weeks. They all ask the same thing: Is The Korean Blog List still running? Why has our blog not been approved yet?

It’s not unusual for blogs to take several weeks before they appear on The Korean Blog List. The reason is that many people submit their blog when they are all gun-ho for blogging and then shortly after submitting, their enthusiasm for blogging wears off and the blogging stops. I like to monitor blogs for a while after they are submitted to make sure they are continually being updated.

Here’s some tips for helping yourself get listed on The Korean Blog List:

1. Maybe sure you’ve been blogging for at least a month and your blog posts are regular - at least weekly. And after you submit - keep blogging!
2. When you submit your blog, read the “Read this carefully” section carefully! If, for example, you write your city as “Los Angeles, CA” or “Seoul-shi”, your submission will either be rejected or severely delayed until I can edit it. Similarly, if you submit as being a foreigner when you’re actually of Korean descent, your blog will be rejected or delayed. If you realise you’ve made a boo-boo on the submission, follow the link in the confirmation email to change your submission.
3. And while I’m on the subject of confirmation email - did you actually receive one? If you didn’t, you may have entered an incorrect email address or the mail might be in your SPAM/JUNK folder. Unless you confirm you’ve received the mail by clicking the link inside it, your blog wont be listed.
4. Finally, make it easy for me to see from your blog that you’re living in Korea or that you’re Korean living overseas or that your blog is about Korea. If I can’t verify, I can’t add you.

If your submission is delayed by a month or more, feel free to contact me and ask what’s happening. But make sure you’re read the points above first!

Remember: The Korean Blog List is not a business. I started TKBL before I moved to Korea, to help bring together bloggers and share knowledge. That was back in 2002. It’s now 4 years since I left Korea and I’m keeping the site running as a service to people who blog about Korea. You can help out by making a small donation or by purchasing the Beer in Korea app for iPhone and iPod Touch and Android (search in Android market), or by purchasing one of my other lovely mobile apps.

Alan

A backlog of applications for TKBL has built up thanks to people submitting applications and entering provinces or states in the “city” section, writing titles designed to “STAND OUT” in the list, or entering brand new blogs which have just one or two posts in them.

I’ve spent a lot of time working through the backlog today and to prevent this happening again, I’ve updated the Add Blog page. If your blog was rejected today or still hasn’t been approved and you don’t know why, read through the Add Blog page and I’m sure it will become clear.

At some point in the last two days, the company that hosts The Korean Blog List made unannounced server changes which broke the entire Korean Blog List website. Because these server changes were unannounced, I had no idea the site was broken until kindly pointed out to me by Jon of I’m A Seoul Man, In Tokyo fame.After a calm panic, I have now updated and tested the entire site - so everything should be working again. If you do notice any problems - submitting blogs, replying to language exchange listings, etc - please please let me know via the contact page.Thanks to everyone for your patience while the site was broken, and especially to Jon for reporting the issue.

The Korean Blog List now contains over 500 blogs, which is a far cry from the handful it started out with all those years ago.

I try my best to go through the listings from time to time and filter out links which are broken, authors who have given up, etc - but I don’t have the time to do it as regularly as I would like. So I would like your help.

If you have a spare five minutes, please try visiting a few blogs you have not read before, and if you spot any bad links, please flag them via the Report Bad Listing page. This will not only improve the quality of the listings, but it will introduce you to a few blogs you’ve never seen before - you may find something you like!

Some reasons to report a bad listing:

• A link which is broken
• A link which resolves to an advertising search page
• A link which resolves to a commercial site (some sites try to get listed as blogs and then once listed, switch content - apparently a listing here is that prized!)
• A blog which is listed in the wrong section (eg, no longer living in Korea)
• A blog which isn’t more than 50% English (eg, Chinese)
• A blog which hasn’t been updated for more than 3 months

If everyone listed on TKBL participates just a few minutes doing this every month or so, it will really help the quality of the listings here. Better quality listings mean more people will find TKBL useful, which will ultimately drive more bloggers to you.

Thank you!

Back in March when I redesigned TKBL, I added Nationality, Country, and City to the “Add blog” page.  Now that there are quite a few blogs with that information in the database, I’ve updated the Foreigners In Korea, Koreans In Korea, Koreans Outside Korea, and Foreigners Outside Korea listings pages to display that information. Being able to find other bloggers in the same city or from a particular country makes TKBL listings far more useful.

Want to search for someone in a particular city or from a particular country? Just go to the relevant listings page and use Find in your web browser.

Some listings have not been updated with the new information - if you’re blog is one of them or if you’ve moved, click here to update your listing.

Note: As per TKBL rules, people who are half-Korean, adopted Korean, overseas born Korean, etc are listed as Korean here. This is for consistency. Some Korean-Americans refer to themselves as Korean even though their nationality is American; others refer to themselves as American - it would really mess up the listings if there was no consistency.

I’ve just upgraded The Korean Blog List’s hosting, moving to a more powerful server.

Update: Tranfer is now complete.  I’ve fully tested the site, but if you notice any issues, please tell me about them. You can contact me via the Contact TKBL page, or the Contact Me page at Lemon Soju (one of my blogs).

I’ve just added step-by-step instructions on how to add the latest Korean blogs to YOUR blogger homepage. It’s very simple, and very cool.

Visit: Add the latest blogs to your Blogger blog
Want to see the lastest blogs appear on the sidebar of your blog? You and your readers will have instant access to the very latest Korea related English language blogs, direct from your blog.

The Korean Blog List Blog is now LIVE. All site announcements will be made here, and new blogs will be added automatically as they are added to the site.

You can also subscribe by RSS using Google Reader or any other feed reader. For Wordpress users, you can even add the feed to your sidebar (as I have done in my website) by using widgets such as Simply RSS Fetcher - I’ll post an article on how to do that in a few days time.

Since launching the new Korean Blog List site last week, I’ve been continuing work on new features.
 
One of the features I was most excited about adding was the ability to allow bloggers to see how many users clicked through to them from The Korean Blog List, and to show tables of the most popular blogs.
 
A few days ago I updated the code to start collecting the statistics required to do this. Unfortunately, given the amount of people using The Korean Blog List to visit blogs, the tracking and database updates put such a strain on my hosting server than my web host complained, and I’ve had to back-out the changes.
 
I’m not very happy about that - it’s a feature I’d really liked to have part of the site.
 
Now I’m faced with a decision: pull the feature completely (and some of the other cool features I had planned), or pay money for more powerful servers.  The latter wouldn’t be cheap, and certainly wouldn’t be covered by the income from advertising (that doesn’t even cover the current hosting costs, because not enough people click on the ads).
 
Work on other new features continues, but I’ll have to be very careful about what I add.