[toplists]

In November 2013  I put together a list of the Top 20 disability blogs by traffic ranking. I got a lot of feedback including a lot of blog recommendations (over 100 were added to the system) so I updated my list for December. I’ve now formalised (and automated) the process a little bit more and today I’m going to presenting Top 20 Disability blogs by traffic ranking – February 2014.

My own blog appeared in the December listing and it appears in this one as well. To avoid even the hint of conflict of interest, I’m going to give the full mechanism I use to generate the listings, and the rules for inclusion.

To get on this list, there are two conditions: first of all you must be regularly (but not exclusively – many of these bloggers explore a range of topics) posting about some aspect of disability.

The second is pragmatic. For fairness, the blog should be the reason that most people come to your site, not the only reason, but it should be the main one. I have no doubt at all in my mind, that Ouch, is probably the world’s most read disability blog, but I also have no doubt that the main reason that people go to bbc.co.uk is probably not for that blog. So I can’t really use the Alexa bbc.co.uk ranking as a good measurement.  Plus I’d like to highlight, independent, unpaid, grassroots blogs.  A recent casualty of this has been that I’ve had to remove www.wrightslaw.com from the list, but I think they’ll understand (Disabilitynow is *just* on the right side of this I think, comments welcome…)

Regarding the method I use to generate the list – I put these two commands into my mac terminal:

wget --wait 5 -i ../towget.txt #this takes a while, there are a lot of URLs
grep -o -h "\"[^\"]*ranked number.*\"" * | sed 's/[,\"]//g' | sed 's/ is ranked 
number / , /g' | sed 's/in the.*//' | sort -n -k 3 | sed 's/\(^.*\) ,/<a href="\"http:\/\/\1\"">\1<\/a> ,/' | head -n 25 

…and that produces the top 25 list for me. (towget.txt containes the list of alexa urls, everything else is installed on any mac or Linux setup)

Onto the news,

It’s quite a volatile list, with five new entires and a lot of movement, withalittlemoxie.com looks like it has smashed in at number 1, which isn’t quite fair, actually I screwed something up in my code, and they simply never appeared before. My apologies to the writers – having had a quick peruse I can see why they have such a deservedly wide audience.

Otherwise, one of the big movers has been limpingchicken.com, possibly due to their breaking of the story about sign langauge at Nelson Mandela’s funeral.  Alexa rankings are based on a three month average, so it will be a while before that bounce fades.

In terms of future plans, I’m going to make this yet more automatic (the table should be generated automatically for a start, rather than just the numbers and links), and then it’s a relatively short hop to have it automatically generate daily or weekly. I’m also considering moving to a ‘Top 50’, but that’s going to require quite a lot of pruning of the rest of the list to take out the ‘businesses that happen to have a blog’ issue.