Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog on Friday April 20, 2007 - 08:12am (CDT)
Or at least I'm trying to. Technorati has been fouling up, or maybe Yahoo has, or how about both? I went through Technorati's bleepity-bleep "claim your blog" process, and got to enjoy the experience of being given the runaround by a mindless piece of software. First, the system will give one a piece of code to insert in a new blog post, which I did. (That's where this post first came from). Then one clicks on a button saying "release the spiders", I which I did, only to get this error message:
"Sorry, your claim could not be completed because we couldn't find the claim code on your site. Please make sure you've followed all the steps above and try again.
I go over to have Technorati ping my blog, to make sure that it is seeing the updated version on which one will find the link and wonder of wonders, discover that every time you do that, their system changes the url on the link one needs to insert. Isn't that a hoot?
To make the system work, one needs to have the code one will get after one pings, before one pings, meaning that one has to sent that information back in time to one's earlier self, and good luck with that . What can one do? Other than report the problem, shrug, note that I've made a good faith effort and stop caring. The question is, who should I stop caring about. As per Technorati's suggestion, I checked this mini-blog over at the w3.org validator service and got this impressive menu of errors, not a one of which I could fix, as one needs root level access to redo the source code on this blog. Lovely. Assuming that the problem isn't the validator, and if it wasn't, how would I know?
Here's the link Technorati's system provided me. I've done my part, now let's see if they care enough about what it is that they do, to do their part as well. I'll give them until tonight, but that's it. The maddening question is - who are "they"? Technorati or Yahoo? Do I stop bothering with the service or with this blog? One tends to assume that Yahoo will be at least marginally technically competent, but that code check was really discouraging. Then again, a check of my place over at Blogger produced even more errors, and that got into Technorati just fine. Both pages seem to display well, so maybe the validator is what is messed up? Oh, and how did working this one out become my job?
Aftermath: Technorati had a decent work around for the problem, so the whole problem became a moot point: Instead of using the full blog url, one uses
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/(user name)
or, in the case of this blog
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/cafe_satan
for very minor historical reasons
http://cafesatan.bravehost.com/
Comments, added in October: It wasn't that decent of a workaround - Technorati still couldn't find links to any of my posts on my 360 blog, not even the ones that I knew existed, because they were links that I had made myself, on my other blogs!
At the time of this reposting, Yahoo 360 is due for elimination in a few months, so if you're coming in much later, that short url might take you nowhere. I include it only for the sake of making this archive as complete as possible. I'll talk about this later.
