Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Yet More On Technorati Tags

As you all know I think the new Technorati Tags are a fantastic idea - so fantastic I implemented the tagging code on our icons as quickly as possible.

However all is not well in the world of Technorati Tags - or at least not as far as NewLinks is concerned. Our success at getting into the tag pages has been patchy to say the least. We failed to get in with the first one but that was at least partially down to me as I forgot the rel tag. I say partially as the rel tag is now in but that particular post was updated fairly quickly and as far as I know still hasn't appeared in the blogging category yet. Bungers then published his weird sea creatures post and that got into the UglyAssFish category. Yay we were off!

This prompted me to soup up our icon code immediately to do the tags and by 9pm that evening it was implemented. The post to announce this included 4 tag icons. We got into Newcastle upon Tyne, NUFC and Lego but not Football. Curious.

However the most curious thing of all happened yesterday. ILuvNUFC posted here and on his site using the same icons - those for death, film, monkey, charver and robot. His post on his site appeared in all five categories - his post here got into none!

Now NewLinks isn't even appearing in categories it has appeared in previously! For instance I linked a post to the UglyAssFish category again - yet it still only contains Bungers' post.

We've had someone on here from Technorati saying there was a problem parsing some tags and I read on Dave Sifry's page last night that the problem extends as far as incorrect parsing of some tags from some blogs.
This is still beta software. It has bugs. There are kinks to be worked out, and missing features, too. For example, we still miss some tags here and there, especially for certain weblogs, due to some post detection issues.
I notice all his tags work correctly! ;)

It looks like NewLinks is amongst the "certain weblogs". I'm fairly sure it's not post detection issues as I ping Technorati (and many other web services after evry post) and Technorati are definitely aware of updates here as we appear in other people's Cosmos fairly quickly after we link to them. This is really frustrating - such a neat idea (and rapid implementation here) and we are being excluded! Hopefully the Technorati crew get the problem sorted quickly. Most importantly I hope they retrospectively scan older posts for the tag system so they aren't excluded forever.

As mentioned in previous posts feel free to use our icons with added tag goodness. They may not work on this blog but they might on yours!

EDIT: More of our posts are now starting to appear in various categories like this one. Hopefully the problem is solved and they are going through older posts now.

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