Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

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Pre-Holiday Housekeeping

I spent some time today doing house keeping on some old projects and following up on some old blog posts:

1. A few months ago when I added tags, I noticed that Technorati did not pick them up. This is till the case but it has gotten much worse - I no longer see my blog in their system when I sign in and I cannot reclaim it for some reason. Additionally, their search results have been a bit iffy lately returning mainly stale data. Also, today I ran across some old support emails from Technorati which were never answered by them. I tried following up, only to have my own emails to them returned right back to me. I did a little digging and noticed that others have been complaining as well. So for now, I added IceRocket’s site search to see if it is any better than Techorati with eventual goal to get rid of it all together.

2. Going over server logs, I noticed that a sizable chunk of my monthly transfers are being consumed by my track2rss project that uses RSS for tracking packages. Since my provider does not keep web logs past one week, I added a very rudimentary logging system to see what is going on. Random checks of tracking numbers revealed something VERY interesting - it seems that many of these packages have been delivered ages ago BUT the feeds were not removed. I am seriously considering adding something to generate warnings once the feed is over 2 weeks old so let users know to remove them. I am also planning on generating some graphs from the logs to see the overall usage. I also happened to see some referals coming from Ajax homepages like Google and NetVibes. I am considering writing up some widgets for them. There are also plans for adding DHL tracking. It has been a while since I worked on it.

3. For a while tagging has been causing a problem. Every time I added a new entry with more than 2 or 3 tags, I would 500 errors from MovableType. I finally figured out that the problem is the fact that my web host restricts scripts to a certain time limit and that causes them to time out while rebuilding tag archives. So as a temporary stop-gap measure I got the mt-rebuild script and am rebuilding stuff by hand. When I get the time, I will switch to either Movable Type dynamic or the new WordPress 2.0.

4. About a month ago I mentioned SiteAdvisor’s miscategorization of my site as one caring spyware. Well, after an email to them and a review by Ben “anti-spyware” Edelman himself, my rating is back to “mostly harmless”. Oh, and congrats to the Site Advisor team on being aquired by McAfee.

(Just as a side note, Ben Edelman addressed my prior comparison between spam blacklists and Site Advisor in a private email to me. I want to point out that SiteAdvisor has something that all blacklists should have - a proper removal mechanism. For more info, see section 2.6 of an old draft I once edited for the ASRG).

That’s all folks and happy Passover to all of you!

Tags: tagging —

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