Technorati Schmechnorati
In the past, I've relied pretty heavily on Technorati's indexing service to give me some idea of how many referrerals I'm receiving from other weblogs and to show me the chain of discovery associated with a particular link I'm planning to post.
However, their service has become increasingly unreliable over the past couple of months, and I stopped receiving pings from them altogether about 8 weeks ago. I sent off an e-mail to their "support" last month explaining the problem and the steps I've taken to attempt to verify that it's not due to a pilot error on my side, but have received nothing back other than an autoreply. I'm not impressed.
UPDATE: apparently, I'm not the only weblog being spurned by Technorati for reasons unknown (thanks, Gary)
So the upshot is that I'd like to find a similar indexing service and give Technorati the boot. I want one with a decent search feature, and am considering blogsnow. I'd be happy to entertain any other suggestions.
In other webloggy news, I had my heaviest traffic week ever here thanks to a couple of nice referrals from Boing Boing and Linkfilter. Thanks go out to my fellow ukulele-ist, Mark Frauenfelder for his consistent support of little D-tier, pop-cult bloggers like Yours Truly.
Finally, I will upgrade to MoveableType 3.121 sometime today, so you may experience some technical difficulties viewing this site if all doesn't go precisely as planned.
Comments
i've always found technorati to be a bit iffy. though lately they seem to have gotten a lot worse. i've noticed them missing more and more links.
Posted by: william | December 12, 2004 12:35 AM
William, I suspect that the ping failures I was talking about are what's causing the database to miss so many links.
Technorati is a great tool, but if Sifry's not going to bother fixing it when it's broken, then he shouldn't be surprised when people start abandoning it in droves as soon as something better comes along.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | December 12, 2004 8:54 AM
So what do you think of MT3?
To be honest, I've more or less decided to just stagnate with MT2, which is working just fine for me. Unless MT3 has some amazing improvements to make it worthwhile (and I haven't heard about any, so far).
Posted by: M.Ace | December 12, 2004 3:18 PM
So far, I'm mostly unimpressed. I had some problems installing it, and it wants me to rebuild my index page every time I log in. It also broke my MT Blacklist plugin, and I can't get the newer version to install correctly. The delayed post feature doesn't work because my server won't let me run cron jobs.
So far the only thing I really like about it is that the new version doesn't require me to rebuild the entire site every time I delete a comment.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | December 12, 2004 4:57 PM
Heh. Sounds like I'm definitely stagnating. Or if I really got antsy about playing with a new toy "just because," there are a lot of alternatives out there. My webhost just announced the addition of 1-click install (but where's the fun in that?!) of WordPress. Regarding why that instead of MT, they said: "and they [MT] would require us to do some sort of weird registration for all our users with them in order to even install the free version. Also, WordPress doesn't require 'rebuilding' your blog every time you publish. Mostly though, installing WordPress was eleven times easier for us." You can take it for what it's worth.
Posted by: M.Ace | December 12, 2004 8:16 PM
MT does have the ability to generate templates dynamically now, but I'm not planning on testing that feature any time soon. I'm a bit surprised that they'd be so anal about licensing the free version since they don't provide any support for it anyway.
As for ease of installation, I can't conceive of any product less intuitive than MT. I install Unix on large computer systems on a damn-near daily basis, and it's a breeze compared to this. Jumping Jebus on a stick, you'd think they'd at least dump the piecemeal file replacement approach and put everything into an install script!
Posted by: MrBaliHai | December 12, 2004 10:08 PM