Today I realized that I have not claimed my authorship of this blog on Technorati yet. And since usually Technorati is the first tool the majority of bloggers use to make their blogs noticed by other bloggers, I have decided to correct this by claiming this Profy blog.

Obviously, I already have an account on Technorati that owns our multi-author Profy blog (I will appreciate you adding this blog to your favorites, of course, if you like reading our posts). If you do not have an account yet, you will have to register first.

After signing in to Technorati if you want to claim a new blog (claiming a blog means that you show and prove that you are the author of this blog), you will need to go to your account. To do so, click the ‘Edit’ link located to the right from your user name:

In the account editing screen choose the ‘Blogs’ section. This section shows all the blogs you already write and manage along with their properties (the blog authority, the number of incoming links to these blogs, and the number of people that added these blogs as their favorites).

In the end of the list of your claimed blogs you will see a special ‘Claim a Blog’ pane where you can initiate process of claiming your blog:

Type (or paste) the URL of your Profy blog (in my case it is http://svetlana.profy.com) and click ‘Begin Claim’ button to initiate claiming process.

Doing so will take you to the step 2 of the process: choosing the claim method. The only option available for Profy blogs is “Post Claim”: it means that to claim your blog you will need to write a new blog post on Profy and include a special link to this post – this link will show Technorati that you are the owner of the blog.

So after you click “Use Post Claim”, you will be taken to step 3:

In this step you will receive a special code generated by Technorati for its spiders to identify this blog as yours. You will need to paste this code in a new post on Profy in HTML mode:

Publish this blog post. On your blog it will look like this:

After the post is published (make you sure it is live on your blog using the “View blog” button), you will need to return to the browser window where you have the step 3 of claiming process on Technorati and click “Release the Spiders!” button. After this step is completed, Technorati will crawl your blog to find the code it needs to verify that you are really the author of the blog being claimed.

And finally, in the last step you will be given the opportunity to edit settings of your blog on Technorati: add a 250 characters description, choose your blog’s language, add tags to help people discover your blog (usually the more tags you add, the easier it will be for people to find your blog).

Here you will also be able to get the HTML code that you can use on your blog to invite your readers to make your blog one of their Technorati favorites:

The procedure to add one of the buttons to your Profy blog is as follows:

1. Copy the code for the button you like to the Clipboard.
2. Go to Profy -> Blog ->Layout.
3. Click ‘Add a page element’ link to add a new widget. Choose ‘Custom Code’ widget.

6. Click Ok.
7. Drag and drop the new widget in the Layout configuration tab to choose the place where you want it to appear.
8. Click ‘View blog’ to make sure the widget looks exactly like you want it to on your blog. Here you can see what it looks like on my blog placed between my tags and the widget displaying my Twitter updates. You can see it to the left from this text already.

So you are done adding the widget to your blog.

Now that you have completed all the steps and configured the blog settings on Technorati, click ‘Save Blog Info’ to complete the process:

As soon as Technorati crawlers complete their job, you will see your blog added to the list of your claimed blogs with all the properties they have:

Now you can delete the post you wrote to claim the blog – it will not be needed in the future. I have decided to leave mine live on Profy as an example.

You will always be able to edit Technorati settings for your blog, get code for a new widget or even delete this blog from the list of your claimed blogs later should you need to do so.

Happy writing and growing your authority on Technorati!

Here is what Andrew Hemingway wanted to know:

We are trying to add Google AdSense to our site, but we have to put something in the coding. How do we do that? Will the html function in the content editor work? Or do you have to add this feature in for us. Can you please let me know. Are there any analytics built into the site?

I guess many users have already noticed that Profy is one of only a handful of blogging platforms that actually allow for bloggers to show ads on their blogs (we have no limitations for that) and earn money without having to deal with hosting and other standalone blogs issues. But for the time being we have not created any special plug-ins to make this possible.

Actually if you use HTML editor in the blog posts editor, you will need to insert the code for every single post you create. So what I can recommend you is as follows:

Go to the Blog -> Layout tab

When you configure the layout of your blog, you can use the link ‘Add a page element’ in the lower left corner of the layout editing screen to add a new widget. From the list of available widgets choose the ‘Custom Code’ to add any HTML/JavaScript code as a widget for your blog. Here you can paste the code that you can get from your Google AdSense account.

After adding the widget, you can drag and drop layout elements to arrange everything the way you want your readers to see it on your blog.

If you use Google AdSense do not forget that in your account should be properly configured to allow your ads to be displayed on your Profy blog. Make sure that in AdSense Setup tab => Allowed Sites you either have ‘Allow any site to show ads for my account ’ (this is the default setting) or have added your Profy blog URL in the list of allowed sites.

And do not forget to check the publishers policy and ToS of the advertising network you use to display ads on your Profy blog not to violate some of the conditions.

Regarding analytics, for the time being we do not have any built-in tools for users to track their visitors. Such tools will definitely be added in the future but unfortunately the alpha version lacks such functionality. For the time being I think the best option is to add a widget for Google Analytics to your blog. This widget can be configured as you want it to be and added to your blog via the Custom Code widget from the Layout tab.

And keep in mind that there are tons of great widgets on WidgetBox and other websites that you can use via the Custom Code for your Profy blog. I will try to add a widget for my Twitter updates here as soon as I click the Publish button.

And do not forget to let me know about the great widgets that you use to enhance your Profy blog so that I could share this knowledge with all the users (if you do not mind sharing, that is).