Blogger mother lode

Over at NEPA Blogs I specialize in brute-force searches for bloggers. If you're a blogger and mention something like "NEPA," "Northeastern Pennsylvania," "Nanticoke," "Wilkes-Barre," or "Scranton," I'm going to do my best to find you and link to you. (Unless, of course, you're just talking about, say, the National Environmental Protection Act, or the Nanticoke, Ontario coal-fired power plant.)

Problem is, not everyone who blogs in Northeastern Pennsylvania feels the need to mention Northeastern Pennsylvania on their blog. So then I have to look for other ways to locate bloggers from NEPA. Fortunately, Blogger has provided a tool for locating bloggers using the Blogger platform based on location information they have included in their profiles. So, for example, I can locate any bloggers who list their location as "Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, United States" by going to my own profile and clicking on the word "Nanticoke." I get this link:

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=l&loc0=US&loc1=Pennsylvania&loc2=Nanticoke

which, at this moment, lists 29 different profiles. Unfortunately, not everyone spells out "Pennsylvania." So modifying that URL to the postal abbreviation of PA, I get

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=l&loc0=US&loc1=PA&loc2=Nanticoke

with another 61 profiles.

By changing the "loc2" value in those two strings to Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Pittston, or West Pittston, I have located hundreds of previously undiscovered bloggers. Considering the sheer number of named population centers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, there's a lot more digging to be done.

Thing is, I have done these searches in the past, and the results have been frustrating. Profiles without blogs, or dead blogs, or single-entry blogs, or blogs that stopped updating long ago. And that was the case again during this search. But I also found dozens of blogs that  had been updated in the last week or two.

On a whim, I changed that "loc2" value to "NEPA." Doing that with a "loc1" value of "Pennsylvania" turns up 16 bloggers. Changing "loc1" to "PA" finds another 17. Backing up one more step and deleting "loc2" and replacing "loc1" with "NEPA" lists a whopping 74 bloggers. "loc1" = "Northeastern PA"  gives another 24 results, "Northeastern Pennsylvania" gives 40, "Northeast Pennsylvania" gives 44, "Northeast PA" gives 61, "NE PA" gives 21, and "NE Pennsylvania" gives another (but different) 21.

So. Not every one of these profiles has a blog, and not every blog is "live." Some profiles have multiple blogs. Some of these blogs are already listed.

Bottom line: there's a lot of blogs here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. And it's going to take a while to link them all.