Technorati answers to indexing-problems

This seems to be the week of mea culpa; back at Bloglines i had constant problems with Technorati indexing my site. I’ve written three emails to their helpdesk and I finally got a reply – after 14 days:

Hello Alexander,

Please accept my sincerest apologies for the delay in getting back to you. We’ve been experiencing a backlog in support and are working hard to address everyone. I’ve taken a look at your blog regarding indexing your posts. However, it looks like your blog as moved to “itnomad.wordpress.com”. I’ve checked to see if we are successfully indexing your blog here. It looks like all is in order and your site has been indexed recently.

http://technorati.com/blogs/itnomad.wordpress.com/

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions. Thank you for using Technorati!
Best Regards,
Janice Myint
Customer Support Specialist
Technorati

Janice: Thanks for looking into my issue, i really appreciate that. You’re giving a good example against the people out there who are calling in the decline and end of Technorati.

For all you Technorati-affected fellow bloggers out there: Don’t give up, eventually they’ll answer to your support. They’re doing a good job and i wouldn’t call it “the decline of Technorati”, as some fellow bloggers called it. It didn’t really helped me since i moved, but it’s a good feeling to know that their /var/spool/mail/support isn’t linked to /dev/null.

Tech Tags: technorati problems

Bloglines answers to database-problems

Three days after i moved this blog from Bloglines to WordPress.com because of constant problems with their database, i finally got an reply:

Response (M.M.) – 08/08/2006 03:13 PM
We are aware of the situation you have reported, and our technical team is working towards resolving this issue as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

Please check our Bloglines news page for future updates:

http://bloglines.com/about/news

Customer – 08/06/2006 10:40 AM
In about 50% of all accesses to any of my postings, no content is display. The header and my blogrole will be shown anyway, but not the posting itself.
I don’t know what to say, but chose any link of http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ITnomad?id= and set id to any of the postings.
If you hit reload several times – like 8 or 10 times – the blog-posting will eventually appear.

This is crazy!

Are you still having problems with your database?

Cheers, Alex.

Er, what? I checked their page and they still don’t give a word about the database problems, they still call it “[...] some users have been seeing inaccurate counts on their subscription lists.“

What does that have to do with postings in my blog that vanish and reapear?

Crazy. Dear Bloglines-folks: Thanks for your service. Please take care that your users get a working blog as soon as possible.

Tech Tags: bloglines database problems bloglines

Move of Blog complete

I finally finished moving my Blog from Bloglines to this place. It was quite some work, although not as much as i expected. Unfortunately i wasn’t able to rescue all my posting from my old Blog, but well… Read for yourself.

First, Bloglines didn’t support the Technorati ping-API. Which is actually no real problem, the real problem seems to be Technorati itself :) They don’t index other peoples sites anyway, everything seems to be pretty much screwed up there.

Then Blogline’s service was pretty much barebone, but it was friggin fast. On the other hand it created constant bad HTML, inserted lot’s of Javashite into my code, made all external links to appear in new windows (something i personally REALLY REALLY hate).

It didn’t have proper import- or export-function so i couldn’t take over my old postings to this new site.

And then it failed. Completely. First my blogroll went berserk. Showed “12 unread postings”. Clicked on the blog, no postings. Reload, reload, reload – there we go.

Then my blog failed. First just a couple of individual pages. Considering that they had some problems with the database in the past i thought “oh, could be a small temporary problem” – but then my whole blog stopped working. To me it looks like they don’t have all database-servers correctly synchronized.

I even wrote a Perl-program which used XML::Parser to fetch all Bloglines-posting, grab out the title, content and date and create plain HTML-pages which i could have possibly inserted with the help of normal http-POST operations into this very new blog; but XML::Parser failed to parse the bad HTML of the postings i extracted from Bloglines (via an easy loop, “for i in `seq 1 140` ; do wget -O $i.html http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ITnomad?id=$i ; done”)

Lot’s of people were asking me all the time “why haven’t you moved yet”? And my answer was: Too lazy. I didn’t want to run my own blog-software on one of my servers ’cause i feared that i could bugger up things – and then i would need to repair it ;) However, now Bloglines failed and i got sick of it.

And there i am, with my fancy new blog – to be honest: I already like it :)

Thanks for your time, hope to keep you as a reader,

Alex.

P.S.: If anyone finds an old link which still opens a friggin new window, please, tell me. I’m going to kill that off immediately.