Why doesn’t Technorati ever seem to work quite right (or at least work as they claim it does)? In addition to being slow as molasses, it has recently started to incorrectly index my posts. Maybe I shouldn’t complain since a month ago it wouldn’t index me at all. But now it’s schitzophrenic and associating the tags of each of my entries with the text of the post before it.
I sent this to their tech support yesterday:
I have had a lot of trouble getting my WordPress blog indexed, but it started to work when I added http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping to be pinged each time I post.
BUT, then I realized I should have tuned on the option to “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article.” So I turned that on.
Now that they are both attempting to ping you, my posts are showing up with the wrong title!
My recent entries have been in your database with title and tags of one post, and the body and permalink of the previous post. (Then I think the post disappears from your database when the next one is added.) Here is an example: http://technorati.com/search/%22blog%20maven%22
Help! Should I turn off one of my updating services? If so which one? Thanks for your help.
I haven’t heard back from them so I am going to just turn off the thing I recently turned on and see if that helps…
I sent an email to support@technorati.com and made a comment on David Sifry’s alerts. See my weblog.
I did see your blog, hence my comment there.
I contacted Technorati support yesterday and sent a trackback to Dave Sifry today, but guess what? The entire Technorati.com website (as well as Sifry.com) appear to be down!
I really feel for them, they are trying to do a lot, and in their line of work everyone they care about will notice this huge outage in the middle of the day.
This combined with increasing talk of how Technorati plans to make money off our data is making me look for alternatives.
Update: Technorati is back online.
You still won’t find my recent posts there. Guess I’ll keep tweaking the settings…
I replied to your comment on my blog.
Both Hans and Jack referred me to their blogs where they say they got a personal response from Dave and then Technorati fixed it. This isn’t very helpful for me since I haven’t been able to get anyone at Technorati to answer me other than the autoresponse when I first submitted my support request on their website.
I have trackbacked and commented on Dave Sifry’s blog to no avail. Who do I have to sleep with the get this fixed!
Here is the first response I have received – now five days after my request for help. It does not acknowledge any of the information that I provided, including the fact that I was being indexed just fine before Technorati’s recent “upgrade.” Intead it gives me HTML advice. (Which is needed since this site is based on somone else’s theme and has some issues, but which has nothing whatsoever to do with being indexed by Technorati or anyone else.)
How is it that Hans and Jack both got personal responses and got their problems fixed, but I got an HTML lecture? Why do I keep thinking that being a white male would help get this problem fixed faster?
I guess I’ll start looking for alternatives. Any suggestions?
You might enjoy this
And (if you haven’t read it) the post being referred to is also excellent.
Nice! I guess I’m not paranoid, they are really out to get us… Maybe just a little bit. 😉
And thanks for the indirect link to that great essay on women in IT.
If you want to try the direct approach, Dave’s AOL IM is dsifry. He IM’d me within 15 minutes of my posting something questioning Technorati’s business model. To be fair, he also was good about fixing a problem I pinted out over IM with blogspam.
I don’t know if he is out to get women, but there have also been some interesting posts about the technorati staff photo, which revealed a pretty homogenous mostly WM crowd, and there was the Technorati AlwaysOn Pioneers thing …
Alternatives I have tried include Icerocket and bloglines citation search — not obviously better searches, although a lot less downtime, in my experience.
Ruby–
I take care to produce valid XHTML/HTML for the reason that browsers that render correctly should render similarly, and it makes it easier for programs to read it. WordPress is designed to produce valid XHTML, so I am not sure what’s going on.
Validation Link:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//lotusmedia.org/
A clue! WordPress is so zealous about sending trackbacks that it even does it when I reference one of my own blog posts. For example, here it sent the trackback from the correct post (with the correct title & permalink), but the excerpt is from a different post!
It seems like WordPress might be getting stuff confused in my SQL database. Does anyone have an idea about what this might mean or what I can do about it?