Thanks for considering that—yes, perturbation is certainly overrated

That is an excellent suggestion, and we may do just that (see how much easier that was than just being perturbed?).

“That way, blogs that only posted once a month or so, would have their content up for longer (that box has evolved with the need to include more and more blogs).”

I certainly appreciate being in the bottom box as opposed to nowhere. LDSblogs.org is the number two source of hits for my blog (first is Google of course), for which I am very grateful.

That being said, I wonder why you don’t simply open another box as opposed to having so many blogs in the bottom one. There are several blogs in this box that have posts all the time—I’ve found that the average time for being in the box is about 1 day (some of the other boxes are much longer). I wouldn’t care as much about this if it weren’t for the fact that there are a couple really crappy blogs that publish all the time. In addition, there are other blogs that hardly ever post (they probably did more in the past) that are included in some of the middle boxes.

I know that, as you say, you all have real jobs. But here is where Max might have a point—you guys are doing a whole lot of blogging (and commenting), in spite of your day jobs. You (by you, I don’t mean “you,” but those in charge of MA) could prove J. Max wrong that you truly care about the LDS blogging community, rather than mere self-promotion, by paying a little more attention to improving some of these quirks—especially in a way that promotes blogs with posts that have the highest quality, even if they’re not part of the in-crowd. Just a suggestion, you can certainly do whatever you want.

While it is “below the fold,” we do feature links to official LDS sources.

For example, you say, “If LDSBlog portals were truly interested in improving the visibility of faithful LDS content on Google, they would be aware of search engine optimization and attempt to use their popularity to help the church in this regard. Instead they encourage included blogs to place banner links back to the portal, which improves the Google standing of the portal in searches for LDS blogs…”

Well, I would ascribe it to the fact that that we all have day jobs, don’t have the expertise, and have limited pecuniary and temporal resources. I would love to be able to fund such grand improvements.

The reason we have boxes, as opposed to the single list aggregation like planet LDS, is because it allows more fresh content available more easily. For example, when we first started, the biggest blogs, like Times and Seasons, had tons of content, and if they weren’t in their own box, smaller content would be off the page rapidly. The bottom box at LDSBlogs.org, started out as a low frequency posting box. That way, blogs that only posted once a month or so, would have their content up for longer (that box has evolved with the need to include more and more blogs). So the boxes actually allow more traffic to reach more sites. We keep the official MA box at the top because it is our site and we do the work on it. Simple as that. Still, it has been my experience from the referral stats that I have seen from other blogs, that the box system works very well at distributing large amounts of traffic to blogs that otherwise wouldn’t get it.

Besides the technical hurdles, which we don’t have the resources to tackle, adding rss feeds and the like seems like it would take away from the individual sites, not add to them. Wouldn’t you rather have someone subscribe to your own RSS feed and not someone that is aggregating your feed? Maybe I am misunderstanding etiquette, but that seems a bit odd to me.

You also say: “Since the advent of LDS Blog Portals, the official church websites have added numerous RSS Feeds. If the portals were interested in building up the church, and not just themselves, they would find ways to incorporate and promote official church content.”

The thing is, J. Max, LDSBlogs.org exists to promote Mormon blogs. We have toyed with the idea of including news feeds and official content, but we have opted to stick with blogs (as if that weren’t a big enough job).