I have joined Technorati and finally claimed my blog

After several failed attempts to claim my blog as a new Technorati member I finally grokked the solution, applied it to my server, and claimed my blog officially! If you are a Technorati member and use Movable Type, or a similar self-installed blog, and are having trouble getting the Technorati spider to recognize and claim your blog, and your website is hosted on an Apache based server, and you are able to upload files to your server via an FTP client, read on for my solution.

I went through several failed attempts before I figured out what the problem was. Like many other bloggers who install their own blog, I installed mine to a sub-directory off the web root, not to a sub-domain. My index page is named index.html and is in that sub-directory. The path to the blog, exemplified, is:http://www.examplified-domain.com/blog
This path is not a problem for any of the search bots as they all index my posts without a hitch. All except the Technorati spider used to "claim" a blog. After reading the access logs over and over I finally figured out that the spider was having a problem because of the way my server was redirecting the request for the index page, and because of the way Technorati strips out all information appended to the end of the path you give it in your profile. E.g. if you try to tell Technorati that your blog's index is at http://www.examplified-domain.com/blog/index.html, it will strip out the last forward slash and the name of the index file, leaving this as it's search: http://www.examplified-domain.com/blog . Your server, if it is setup like mine, will append a trailing slash to that requested URI, then redirect it to the index.html file, without revealing that file name. The stupid spider thinks that is is anywhere but where you told it to go and your claim fails!

Here is what I did to help the Technorati spider get it right. Using notepad, or any other plain text or html editor, create a new plain text file with the following contents:
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(blog|blog/)$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog/index\.html$ RewriteRule (.*) /blog/index.html [R=301,L]
Note that the $ are dollar signs, using the shift key and the number 4 key on a standard keyboard.

Now save this file with the filename " .htaccess ". If you cannot save it with that name, save as htaccess.txt instead and rename it on the server. Next, upload the file to your server, to the directory where your blog index file resides. If you had to change the name, rename it on the server, to .htaccess . Your eyes are not deceiving you. There is no prefix, just a period, followed by htaccess. This is a special server control file used by Apache servers. If you use FTP software to upload and download files to the server, you may have to set the remote "file mask" to -al to view this normally hidden server control file, after uploading it.

With this .htaccess file in the same directory as the blog's index file go back to Technorati, login, and begin the claim process again. If you did everything the same way I did you should succeed in Claiming your Blog!

I hope this helps somebody else, as from what I have been reading, Technorati is not able to help a lot of people who use Movable Type blogs on their servers.

Good luck MT bloggers!
Wiz Feinberg
http://www.wizcrafts.net/