Personal Website of Yakov ShafranovichShafTek.org = SHAFranovich TECHnologies |
I recently mentioned that Technorati did not reply to my emails. Apparently, that has changed and my Wed email was answered quickly. Everything seems to be working fine with Technorati and tags (unlike before). They are finally being indexed properly!
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!
A new company called EdgeIO is developing a new type of classfieds services - items tagged with the tag “listing” in people’s blog will be automatically picked up and indexed into something like Craiglist (more info here).
One very interesting question - how do they deal with tag spam?
For quite some time I have been using Google’s AdSense ads. Today I tried changing some of the individual and category archives to the beta of theYahoo Publisher program and also tried out Kanoodle’s BrightAds. In two words … they stink. While the Google AdSense at least had ads on blogging and creating your own blog, Yahoo and Kanoodle had what is normally found in spam - mortgages, degrees and generic Vonage ads. So instead I switched everything back to Google.
However, while doing that, I was thinking about whether I can use the category, title or tags on the post to help focus the ads. So what I came up with is simple but breathtaking - I used Amazon’s associates links for the book search to get listings of books relevant to a specific category or tag. Suprinsgly it works very well - for example, if you look under the Linux category - you will find plenty of Linux books. The rss tag has books on blogging and building RSS feeds. I almost never got such good results from Google itself. Plus the commission that Amazon pays is much better.
How did I do that? Simple - take the code from Amazon’s Associates Program links section for featured product search and use the MovableType category name tag (or in my case the MTArchiveName tag) to pass it to Amazon as a keyword instead. The results are stunning.
After using tagging in other services (Flickr, Technorati, etc.) I finally got around to adding tagging to this blog. I used the recently released Tags plugin developed by MovableType. It uses the “Keywords” section of the MT template to enter tags, and upon entry it adds them to the “Tags” category. IYou can see the tags for each post right above the “posted by” line and a list of all the tags on this blog on the right side (below the categories list). However, there were several other things which I wanted to do with tags as well and here I will provide a short summary of what I did:
1. Display the List of Tags Separatly from Categories.
I have a list of main top level categories and now tags. Since MT treats tags as regular categories, they cluttered up the list. So instead what I did is omitted them from the “Categories” listing and created a separate “Tags” list. In order to exclude the tags from the category listing, I used the following piece of code:
<MTCategories><MTIfIsDescendant parent="Tags"><MTElse>
...
And when doing the tags listing, I did the opposite:
<MTCategories><MTIfIsDescendant parent="Tags">
...
Of course, I would rather have a tagcloud, but so far I haven’t been sucessful in making one.
2. Adding relevant del.icio.us and Flickr content.
For the individual category pages, I added del.icio.us and Flickr links for content with the same tags by using the following two snippets of code:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/netwizard/<$MTArchiveTitle$>“>
</script> <script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?show_name=1&count=5&display=latest
&size=t&layout=v&source=user_tag
&user=42361858%40N00&tag=<$MTArchiveTitle$>“>
</script>
3. Better ads.For category pages ONLY, I also changed the ads by removing Google AdSense and adding Amazon’s Associates links. Specifically, I added the “books” search linked to the name of the category/tag it appears on. I used the code provided by Amazon for putting in two IFRAMES, substituting the keywords in the search section for the name of the category using the MTArchiveName tag. I also removed all Google Adsense code including the referal buttons. Suprisengly, the ads are MUCH more relevant than Google’s ever were (more info in the next post.
You can see the finished product by going to the rss tag page.
P.S. Technorati still doesn’t pick up the tags.
UPDATE: After a comment left by David Sifry (yes, the CEO of Technorati), the problem seems to be that the tag pages themselves have to point to something like “…/tags/tagname” as explained by this page (why the main Technorati Tags page doesn’t mention this, I don’t know). However, since I didn’t want to muck around with Movable Type’s custom archive templates to generate the program “/tags/tagname” archives, I just used mod_rewrite:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^tags/(.*) /blog/archives/cat_$1.html [R]
UPDATE #2: Even with suggestions from David Sifry, something still doesn’t work. I now suspect that the real culprit maybe the Feedburner feed, especially since some people in the FB forums have been complaining. I have added an rewrite rule to serve the original atom feed to the technorati bot while redirecting everyone else to FB.
UPDATE #3: Tags now works and have been picked up by Technorati!
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